How do you monitor and verify the environmental impacts of your product throughout its life cycle?

This step is too often skimmed by, and it's one of the most important ones in LCA. I'm often when educating about this about the paraphrasing from Alice in Wonderland: "if you don't know where you're going, any path will take you there". As with many things in life, it's the same with LCA: how to do things can depend a great deal on who's going to receive that information, what they plan on doing with it, etc. "Smaller" topics such as data quality or allocation strongly depend on the answers to these bigger and broader questions.

Goal & Scope is the first step of LCA and for me the most important one ! LCA results can vary significantly and it should be clearly mentioned what is studied. Is it a product or part of it? Is it a comparative study? Do you calculate GWP only or other impact categories? Do you include all life cycle steps or only cradle to gate?

When it comes to this step, agility is also important. I'm aware that the way LCA has been done traditionally has limited people's exploration and iterations, but modern tools allow you to progressively enhance your models, and as such, always have an answer in front of you. It's quite ironic how much this is skimmed through, even though ISO 14040 emphasizes the feedback loops. After all, some data points might turn out to be practically irrelevant (lowering the importance of getting good primary data) and some areas that we may have initially overlooked may turn out to be too big to ignore (and we have to dig for primary data in them). LCA has a component of discovery, and we can't expect to know everything about the data on day one.

This step is also crutial. It is part of the iterative process described in ISO 14040-44 standard. Every result should be reviewed by the practitioner. A sensitivity analysis on certain parameters allows the LCA practitioner to highlights the "pain points" and the variance on the impacts. This is helpful to find levers to decrease the footprint of the product.

ISO 14040-44 and ISO 14025 are baseline standards. For EPDs, it is possible to verify against many standards depending on the market/type of product. Your product can fall under the scope of a Product Category Rule (PCR). Specific rules can apply in your country/region. For instance: - construction products: ISO 21930, EN 15804 - Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) - etc...

say the usage of Digital Twin Technology, Implement digital twin technology to create virtual replicas of products and systems, enabling real-time monitoring and analysis of environmental impacts throughout the life cycle. Example: Develop a digital twin of a manufacturing facility that integrates data from sensors, IoT devices, and production systems to monitor energy consumption, emissions, and resource utilization in real-time.