Dive Summary:
- Lifecycle Assessment (LCA), is one of the most prominent sustainability-measuring systems used today, quantifying and allowing concrete analysis of a product or industry's sustainability.
- In our current 'green' era, an increased demand for a product's environmental consciousness has driven systems like LCA to add new parameters and conditions, recently growing to 25 variables from 10.
- Although already a powerful tool, organizations around the world are finding ways to better the system, which in turn actually effects both sustainable outlook and regulations.
From the article:
"In food production, LCA would look at all of the inputs for a given food, including the environmental and human health costs. These could include issues surrounding the production and application of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers. It could also look at the energy inputs; a product produced locally would score better than one that arrived via cargo aircraft, for example. ..."
