What’s Really Behind a Carbon Footprint? Lessons From Life Cycle Assessment

By Laura Benavides, Director of Sustainability

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become an increasingly important tool for companies trying to understand and reduce the environmental impacts of their products. But until you work through an LCA, it is easy to underestimate just how much sits behind a single carbon footprint number.

Over the past year, our team at Integrity BioChem has been working more deeply with LCA as part of our broader sustainability strategy. That experience has challenged some of our assumptions, strengthened our understanding of our products, and changed the way we think about sustainability data.

My recent visit to the ACLCA conference reinforced many of those lessons and highlighted an important reality: LCA is as much about asking the right questions as it is about calculating the right numbers.

Moving From Sustainability Claims to Quantifiable Data

As a company developing specialty chemistries with a focus on performance and renewable raw materials, we have long looked at attributes such as renewable carbon content, manufacturing efficiency, VOCs, and product performance. LCA allowed us to take the next step.

Instead of looking at individual sustainability attributes in isolation, we began evaluating the environmental impact associated with a product across a defined life cycle, from the production of our raw materials through our own manufacturing process and, where possible, into the way the chemistry is ultimately used.

One of the first things this work reinforced was that the environmental impact of a specialty chemical is not necessarily driven by the manufacturing plant itself.

For several of the products we have evaluated, our own manufacturing contribution to the carbon footprint is relatively small compared with the impacts associated with producing the raw materials that enter our facility. That distinction shifts the conversation from simply asking how efficiently we manufacture a product, to understanding the chemistry and supply chain behind every ingredient that goes into it.

Following the Footprint Upstream

As we dug deeper into our product LCAs, much of our work naturally moved upstream. For each raw material, we began asking questions such as:

• Where does the carbon in this molecule come from?
• Is the feedstock petrochemical, bio-based, or a combination?
• What production pathway is used?
• What energy inputs are required?
• Is the material derived from palm, another plant-based source, or fossil feedstocks?
• Are there regional differences in how it is manufactured?

These questions became especially important as we evaluated products with high renewable carbon content. A product may contain a high percentage of renewable carbon, but renewable content alone does not provide a complete picture of environmental impact. The agricultural feedstock, processing method, energy source, allocation methodology, and supply chain can all influence the result.

LCA gave us a way to begin connecting those pieces.

What ACLCA Reinforced

Attending the ACLCA conference provided an opportunity to hear how practitioners, researchers, consultants, manufacturers, and brands across industries are addressing many of these same issues. A recurring theme was that LCA should not simply be used to generate a number for a sustainability report. Its real value is as a decision-making tool.

Instead of stopping at: “What is the carbon footprint of this product?”

LCA allows companies to start asking much more useful questions:

• Which raw materials are driving our footprint?
• Where are the environmental hotspots in our supply chain?
• Would changing a feedstock materially improve the product?
• Where would better supplier-specific data make our model more accurate?
• How does a renewable feedstock compare with the conventional alternative?
• And where can we make changes that create meaningful environmental improvements without compromising performance?

Those are much more powerful questions.

Performance Still Has to Be Part of the Conversation

This is particularly important in our industry. A chemical with a lower cradle-to-gate carbon footprint is not necessarily the more sustainable solution if it performs poorly once it reaches the customer.

If one chemistry requires significantly higher dosage, produces lower recovery, creates additional waste, increases energy consumption, or adds another processing step, the overall environmental impact may tell a very different story.

LCA is a journey, not a Checkbox

Perhaps the biggest lesson from both our own work and the conversations at ACLCA is that an LCA should not be viewed as a one-time exercise. For us, the goal is not simply to generate the lowest possible carbon footprint number. The goal is to understand why the number is what it is.

What is driving it? Which assumptions matter? Where are the biggest opportunities? And how can we use that information to develop better-performing, more sustainable chemistry?

LCA has given us another lens through which to understand our products: one that connects chemistry, supply chains, manufacturing, performance, and environmental impact.

My experience at ACLCA reinforced that the field is still evolving, and there is a tremendous amount we can continue to learn. For companies beginning their own LCA journey, perhaps the most important thing is simply to begin asking the questions