Life Cycle Assessment

This online engineering PDH course provides an introductory overview of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It is designed to be an educational tool for someone who wants to learn the basics of LCA, how to conduct an LCA, or how to manage someone conducting an LCA.

As environmental awareness increases in the general public, many companies have begun to explore ways of moving beyond mere compliance with the law and instead have sought to evaluate the effects of the companies’ products and practices over their entire lifetimes. LCA is a tool designed to provide this evaluation.  LCA is a “cradle-to-grave” approach for assessing industrial systems. “Cradle-to-grave” begins with the gathering of raw materials from the earth to create the product and ends at the point when all materials are returned to the earth.

LCA evaluates all stages of a product’s life from the perspective that they are interdependent, meaning that one operation leads to the next. LCA enables the estimation of the cumulative environmental impacts resulting from all stages in the product life cycle, often including impacts not considered in more traditional analyses (e.g., raw material extraction, material transportation, ultimate product disposal, etc.). By including the impacts throughout the product life cycle, LCA provides a comprehensive view of the environmental aspects of the product or process and a more accurate picture of the true environmental trade-offs in product and process selection.

This 6 PDH online course is intended for engineers involved in determining the environmental impact of their organizations’ products and practices.