s emissions calculation as part of your sustainability reporting also presenting you with challenges? Do you need data from life cycle assessment (Life Cycle Assessment, LCA) for your reports?
LCA software enables you to precisely analyze the environmental impacts of your products and processes across their entire life cycle. This helps you identify optimization potential, reduce emissions, and strengthen your sustainability strategy based on solid data.
In this guide, we first clarify all the different terms related to emissions. In addition, you will receive a guide for selecting LCA software so you can get started with the right tool and build excellent processes.
If you already know your way around life cycle assessment, have heard about our free matching service, and want to start the selection process for a tool based on your criteria right away, there’s a shortcut here.
We need to take a bit of a step back here, because there are numerous terms surrounding the topic of emissions calculation (such as the Ecodesign Directive, ESPR, CO2 balance, life cycle assessment (LCA), CCF and PCF) that are all closely linked and require an explanation in the overall context:
With the Ecodesign Directive, the EU ensures that products are designed more sustainably. The goal: reduce energy consumption, improve durability and repairability, and lower environmental impact throughout the entire life cycle. If you develop products, you need to take these criteria into account early on in order to meet regulatory requirements while also optimizing your processes.
The new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) goes beyond the previous directive. It affects almost all product categories and requires you to provide comprehensive transparency about the environmental impacts of your products. Key points are: climate friendliness (reducing the CO2 footprint of your products), circular economy (durability, repairability and recyclability of your products), Digital Product Passport (DPP, providing data on materials and environmental impacts).
Tip 1: By meeting the ESPR, you can not only comply with regulatory requirements, but also position yourself as a pioneer of sustainable innovation!
The CO2 balance shows you how many greenhouse gases are generated by your products, processes, or your entire company. It helps you identify the biggest sources of emissions and reduce them in a targeted manner. This includes direct emissions (e.g., from production facilities) and indirect emissions (e.g., through electricity consumption or your supply chain).
Tip 2: A precise CO2 balance is not only the basis for complying with the ESPR, but also an important step in achieving your sustainability goals.
The life cycle assessment or Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides you with a holistic analysis of the environmental impacts of your products. Compared to the CO2 balance, the LCA considers additional factors such as resource consumption, water consumption and waste. With an LCA, you can identify the ecological weak points of your products and implement improvements in a targeted way—a major advantage for acting more sustainably and meeting market requirements.
The Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF) includes all emissions generated by your company. It gives you an overview of direct emissions, purchased energy, and the entire supply chain. With a transparent CCF, you can not only meet regulatory requirements such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), but also develop your reduction strategies in a targeted way and strengthen the trust of your customers and partners.
With the Product Carbon Footprint (PCF), you analyze the climate impact of your products across their entire life cycle—from raw material extraction to disposal. A transparent and as low as possible PCF is becoming increasingly important in order to meet the requirements of the ESPR and at the same time live up to the expectations of your customers.
Tip 3: Products with a low CO2 footprint offer you a clear competitive advantage!
Conclusion: With the right approaches, you can not only meet the EU requirements, but also use them to position yourself as a sustainable company. The Ecodesign Directive and the ESPR provide you with the regulatory framework. Your CO2 balance, the life cycle assessment, the CCF and the PCF are crucial tools for reducing your emissions, improving your products, and at the same time making a positive contribution to climate protection.
Now that all terms have been clarified and put into context, let’s turn to the actual topic of this article: the life cycle assessment—more than just CO2.
As already written, the life cycle assessment (LCA) measures the environmental impacts of a product over its entire life cycle. This includes the following phases:
Raw material extraction
Production
Transport and logistics
Use and sales
Disposal and recycling
With all the data you have to collect and analyze, things can quickly become confusing. LCA software helps you create a standardized framework to analyze and manage the environmental impacts of your products or processes.
And if all that theory still isn’t enough – it goes on – because our goal is to inform you fully and then support you in choosing the right software partner that exactly matches your requirements!
Let’s get to the relevant information for your LCA: There are four life cycle models that you need to consider – depending on your requirements for your LCA:
Cradle to Grave
When you analyze the phases of a product life cycle, this is referred to as cradle-to-grave: from raw material extraction (“cradle”) to disposal (“grave”).
Cradle to Gate
Here, you assess a product only up to the point it leaves the factory—without its use and disposal. This simplifies the analysis and quickly provides insights into internal processes.
Cradle to Cradle
Here, you focus on reuse instead of waste. Materials are recycled and used for new products, thereby closing the life cycle (closed-loop recycling).
Gate to Gate
The gate-to-gate concept is often used for product life cycles with many value-adding processes. It focuses on analyzing a single production step to reduce complexity. You can later combine these individual assessments to create a detailed LCA.
There are four phases of a life cycle assessment, which are specified in the ISO standards 14040 and 14044.
Define goals and set the framework
First, you clarify what the analysis is intended for: Is it about making your processes more environmentally friendly, comparing products, or substantiating decisions? Then you define the framework – what will be examined, which system boundaries will be set, and which assumptions will be included? Clear definitions ensure a well-founded analysis.
Collect data and compile the life cycle inventory (Life Cycle Inventory, LCI)
In this phase, you collect all data relating to your process. This includes inputs such as raw materials and energy as well as outputs such as emissions and waste. The aim is to map the entire life cycle of your products – from production to use and disposal. A comprehensive data basis is crucial.
Analyze and assess impacts (Life Cycle Impact Assessment, LCIA)
Now the recorded data is consolidated into environmental impacts. You examine what effects your processes and products have on areas such as climate change, resource consumption, or water use. This makes it clear where action is needed and which factors are particularly relevant.
Evaluate results and derive measures
Finally, you interpret the results and draw the right conclusions from them. Which improvements are possible, where are your strengths, and which steps can you prioritize? The interpretation ensures that your life cycle assessment is practically useful and leads to clear recommendations.
Both the LCI, i.e., the life cycle inventory analysis, and the LCIA, i.e., the life cycle impact assessment, are extremely complex. For data collection (primary and secondary data) from a wide range of sources and the allocation of data to impact categories, the use of appropriate LCA software is indispensable.
LCA software enables automation and data digitization, right through to simplified data analysis and ESG reporting. A good software application analyzes which services and products in your portfolio have the greatest impact on resource waste, environmental pollution, and climate change. Accordingly, you initiate measures that reduce these impacts.
Once you have mapped the lifecycle data of your goods and services in detail in the software—from raw material extraction through processing, transport, and production to end of life—you can communicate this transparently and thus gain a clear competitive advantage: the better your life cycle assessment, the higher the sales opportunities for your products or services.
LCA is also sometimes part of larger ESG suites, although
Of course, there are differences between various LCA tools, but their overarching goal always remains the same: they support you in achieving your sustainability goals and optimizing your life cycle assessment. To fulfill this purpose, LCA software offers a wide range of functions and features. These include, among others:
Capture and manage data (LCI)
Software supports you in cleanly capturing all primary and secondary data. It also makes it easier to organize the data and, if needed, integrate it into external databases (such as ProBas).
Analyze environmental impacts (LCIA)
With the software, you calculate the environmental impacts of your products or processes. The data is categorized into areas such as climate change, resource consumption, or water scarcity, so you know exactly where you can optimize.
Create reports and visualizations
Good LCA software helps you create meaningful reports and compelling visualizations (e.g., charts, dashboards). This allows you to present your results convincingly not only internally, but also to your customers or partners.
Quality assurance and standards compliance
The software ensures that your analyses comply with ISO standards (e.g., ISO 14040/14044). Data checking and validation tools help avoid errors and maintain high quality.
It goes without saying that choosing LCA software is an important decision for the company. So what should you pay attention to?
Integration and automation
The LCA software should integrate seamlessly into your existing processes—whether in product development or supply chain management. Ideally, you can also automate recurring analyses to save time and resources. And yes, this includes the connected databases in particular.
Industry standards
The LCA tool you choose must be able to understand industry-specific standards and guidelines and apply them accordingly, so that your analyses are precise and compliant with standards.
LCA consulting and onboarding
Do you need support or training from the provider? Especially for LCA beginners, competent consulting can make it easier to get started.
ROI of the LCA software
In addition, you should determine how high the costs are. Life cycle assessment software starts at around €3,000 in annual license costs. Depending on the industry and number of products (similar to CBAM), this budget can rise to as much as €15,000 per year.
Updates and product vision
Finally, you should find out whether the tool receives regular updates to meet current standards and requirements. The product roadmap of the selected provider—i.e., how the software is expected to evolve over the coming years—is also crucial for your own planning.
The Matchilla team continuously screens the growing market for LCA tools. In our database we have been maintaining all relevant software & tool providers (including, among others, for CCF, PCF and ESPR) and researching hard and soft factors such as available modules, functions, languages, interfaces, industry expertise, prices, and much more.
You can now benefit from our unique market overview in the DACH region as well as our expertise from over 700 ESG software comparisons as part of our matchings (for SMEs and corporations) for your own software selection. We are happy to support you with the criteria catalog, a structured provider comparison, all the way through to the final provider selection with our insights.
This is how the provider comparison works: You invest a few minutes in filling out the LCA Match Assistant, and we match the most suitable software providers for you.
The best part: This software comparison is anonymous, non-binding and free of charge for you.
Would you like to know which LCA solution fits your requirements? Simply fill out the following Match Assistant. 👇
We look forward to matching with you!
Finding suitable ESG service providers is easy and super fast via Matchilla. Getting in touch, defining specifications, and after just a few days the results were there. This way, we got information about providers we hadn’t even heard of before. Real added value.
What convinced me about Matchilla were the short and clear paths: our specific need is understood immediately, analyzed perfectly, and matched with the right providers in a short time. Matchilla’s platform works quickly, is straightforward, and guides you precisely through the service provider selection process.
Matchilla’s approach is brilliant: I no longer have to laboriously research consultancies and software providers and struggle through lots of comparison portals—the right providers come to me, so to speak—with just a few minutes of effort. The matching process saves us a lot of resources.
Ulli Theves is Head of CSRD and ESG Matchings at Matchilla and an expert in technical solutions in the field of sustainability. In MatchZINE, he shares his expertise and regularly publishes news and useful information on ESG tech.
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