Life Cycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brand Leaders Master Sustainability

This is the third article in a 4-part series on transparent, accurate environmental claims. All articles in this series include:

Part 3: Life Cycle Thinking: The Best Tool to Help Brand Leaders Master Sustainability

A common dilemma I have is whether to recycle my yogurt containers. I know they are made of recyclable plastic, and my children constantly urge me to recycle, but it’s not so simple.

Here’s why:

Water: I rinse out the container with warm water so the yogurt doesn’t contaminate the recycling stream. How much water am I using?
Energy: The water requires energy to heat it. What’s the source of energy use? Is it from mostly coal (highly polluting) or mostly renewables? And how much energy is required to recycle the plastic?
Waste: Does the yogurt container actually get recycled and reused? Or does the recycling company end up putting it in the landfill?

Even if yogurt brands claim their packaging is recyclable, which is typically accurate, the above aspects are not within their direct control. Companies must understand the myriad factors that can affect the environmental impact of their products to ensure the accuracy of their claims.

As illustrated with this simple daily behavior, sustainability is a complex topic. But there’s an incredibly helpful framework that can help us sort through the mess of terms and impacts: life cycle thinking.

In part 2 of this article series on environmental claims, I described greenwashing as “communications that mislead an audience by creating the perception of a better environmental profile than reality.” There are two key parts to this definition. First, what is the perception that is created? Second, what is the actual environmental profile? It is impossible to understand whether the perception of our environmental profile is accurate if we don’t know what that profile is in the first place.

Life cycle thinking is a helpful tool to better understand, structure, and explain the broad concept of sustainability and the holistic impact of products or services on the environment. The more business leaders and communicators can become familiar with this framework, the more we can deliver meaningful improvements and communicate transparently. In addition to environmental claims, the framework serves as a valuable tool for innovation and business strategy.

Let’s dive in.

What is Life Cycle Thinking?

Every product (and most services) has a life cycle that begins with raw material extraction that is then manufactured, packaged, transported, used, and finally, disposed at the end of it’s life. At each phase of the product’s life cycle there are inputs (materials, energy, water) and outputs (products, materials, waste, emissions).

Life cycle thinking, as defined by the United Nations, is a “way of thinking that includes the economic, environmental, and social consequences of a product or process over its entire life.” Here, I’m focusing on environmental impacts, beginning with the most basic footprints: water, energy, and waste. The visual below refers to a linear product life cycle because most products’ end of life today is a landfill. Later on in this article, we will dive into a circular product life cycle.

To understand your company’s environmental impact, you need to be able to answer these questions for each phase. In the beginning, focus on the most critical products, materials, and inputs.

Raw Materials: Where do we get the materials from? What was that material doing or being used for before it was extracted? What are the environmental impacts of its extraction?
Manufacturing: What are the material, energy, and water inputs required to make the raw materials and the final product? What waste is created during the manufacturing processes?
Packaging and transportation: How are the packaging materials made and transported? How is the product transported at different phases of the life cycle?
Use: What inputs are required to use the product (e.g., energy, water, materials), and what waste is created?
End of life: How is the product disposed (landfill, liter, recycled, or incinerated)?

Why is Life Cycle Thinking Valuable?

If the global population consumed like Americans, we would need 5.1 earths to support us. This current level of consumption is unsustainable, so businesses need new ways to manufacture, sell, and innovate products and services. Life cycle thinking can highlight ways to reduce the use of resources and emissions that contribute to unsustainable consumption and harm air, water, and natural ecosystems. Meaningful changes can then be communicated transparently and accurately.

Life cycle thinking is a helpful framework because it:

Provides context: Understanding a product’s life cycle creates awareness. It forces us to unearth our business’s full environmental impact, not just parts we can easily see. It gives us a reference point for how changes to one phase can positively or negatively impact other phases.
Reduces risk: Evaluating a product’s life cycle can help us better understand possible risk, including environmental risks, marketing risks from misleading or inaccurate communications (which can lead to negative PR), or previously unknown supply chain risks.
Informs decision-making: Life cycle thinking provides a systematic framework for evaluating decisions, helping us understand the tradeoffs and unintended negative consequences of making a change. With this knowledge, we can use information and data to proceed carefully.

How to Begin

Life cycle thinking is, as its name implies, a way of thinking. Applications can be quick and high-level, or extremely detailed, requiring months of analysis. Below are three specific methods that use life cycle thinking to analyze your product or total business’ environmental impact.

Conceptual map:

Sketch out the product’s high-level materials, inputs, and outputs at each life cycle stage. This level of analysis is essential for all businesses. It’s critical to understand which phases have the highest environmental impact and in which footprint areas. Doing so can also highlight significant costs and potential material supply chain or financial risks. Below is a template to help you get started. You can include actual numbers or simply color code the boxes as “low,” “medium,” and “high.” If you don’t know enough to fill it out, do some research to better understand your biggest impacts.

Download this template

Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA):

An LCA is a thorough analysis of all inputs and outputs in each phase across dozens of different types of impacts. There are two general types: streamlined and detailed. A streamlined LCA is a less precise version of a detailed LCA and relies more on secondary data to gather information quickly and inform decisions. Many publicly shared, peer-reviewed LCAs are available online and present a wealth of data to pull from. Allbirds has an in-depth tool and guide to help those getting started. Additionally, numerous software platforms exist to support this analysis as streamlined LCAs are still a complex and technical assessment. Note: Because streamlined LCAs often do not use data from your specific business, they are typically not considered accurate enough to use for marketing claims.

Detailed LCA:

Detailed LCAs are extremely thorough and typically are executed by a qualified third party. These LCAs are verified and checked for accuracy of inputs and adherence to IS0 standards. Detailed LCAs should be conducted before making large environmental investments and are necessary to support environmental claims that span the full product life cycle (e.g. carbon footprint, water, or energy reduction claims). If you’re interested in learning more on Life Cycle Assessments, here is a great in-depth article that includes numerous tools and companies that can perform this service.

Applications for Life Cycle Thinking

Hopefully you now understand what life cycle thinking is, why it’s important, and how to create a rough map of impact. But what are the practical applications when running the day-to-day business, including communications?

Sustainability strategy

Identifying your biggest environmental impacts within a product’s life cycle helps you prioritize your sustainability efforts. Many organizations target waste because it’s so visible, but focusing on material sourcing or the consumer use phase can often have greater impact. The simplest impact reduction across the full life cycle is simply using less to get the same job done, which requires fewer materials, less transport and creates less waste.

Product or service innovation

Sustainable innovation begins with a basic understanding of a product’s greatest environmental impacts. For example, incorporating lower-impact raw materials, or designing products that rely on fewer resources during consumer use, such as high-efficiency appliances. P&G, maker of European laundry brand Ariel, used a detailed LCA to identify that the biggest use of energy (and therefore carbon footprint) was when consumers washed their clothes. This insight helped Ariel prioritize cold-water washing as the No. 1 opportunity to reduce energy use and carbon emissions. The product innovation required superior cleaning technology in cold temperatures to ensure buyers had confidence making the switch.

Inform claims and marketing

When making sustainability claims, communicators need to understand how claims in one phase relate to a product’s total environmental footprint. This helps marketers avoid unintentionally misleading audiences. For example, if Ariel (in the example above) made claims about energy reduction in its manufacturing facility, that could be misleading, because the biggest use of energy happens when consumers wash their clothes. With knowledge of the full life cycle, Ariel marketers would know to be especially careful about how and when they communicate any manufacturing energy improvements because they are a small part of the total impact.

Circularity: The Next Evolution of Life Cycle Thinking

One of the most common and popular applications of life cycle thinking today is the concept of circularity. This idea moves from a linear product life cycle to a circular one. In this model, the end of life feeds into the raw material phase of the next product’s life cycle. Rather than materials going to the landfill, the life cycle becomes an endless loop where materials from the end of one product’s life either feed back into natural systems to support new raw materials (think compost) or are recycled into raw materials for the next phase.

Design plays a critical role in being able to reuse, recycle or compost materials, so product innovation needs to consider end of life upfront. For example, in 2021, Adidas launched its “Made to be Remade” shoe as a product concept. Most shoes cannot be recycled because they are made of dozens of materials including dies, glues, and multiple different types of plastic. Adidas’ shoe was produced from a single material—without any glue or dye—so that it can be fully recycled. They designed a process for customers to return the shoe so it could be ground into pellets and transformed into a new pair. These new types of circular business models require new processes and will take some time to master. Adidas noted about its Made to be Remade program: “One of the main learnings was the need to collaborate with more partners along all steps of the value chain—everything from collection to processing of the used products.” Life cycle thinking gives us the map to begin our journey toward products and services that use less resources and create less waste.

A critical shift takes place when you start thinking about sustainable changes that can be made to your product or business with a life cycle lens. Using this framework is not a silver bullet. There is not always a clear and obvious answer as to which solution is better, because interventions in one area may often have tradeoffs elsewhere. However, adopting this mindset as business leaders allows us to ask more informed questions, forces us to gather more complete data before acting, and inspires new products and business models. As a result, we will be more accurate and transparent when communicating environmental impact.

Stay tuned for our final article in this series on environmental claims: Understanding the Federal Trade Commission Green Guides!

Do you need help applying Life Cycle Thinking principles to your marketing or innovation strategy? We help purpose-driven brands integrate sustainability into their brand strategy.

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