Advance Sustainability Goals With Lifecycle Assessment, the Net-Zero Hero

With growing environmental concerns and sustainability requirements, progress towards net zero is underway – but more can be done, faster. To accelerate sustainable innovation, companies can start by implementing eco-design principles.

A product or service’s design determines 80% of its environmental impact throughout the lifecycle. When companies integrate eco-design into their product and service development, they can weave sustainability into the entire value network and drive a circular economy. Despite 56% of executives knowing this, many struggle to take action, as revealed by a Financial Times (FT) Focus report. Here’s how integrated lifecycle assessment capabilities can help.

Lifecycle assessment (LCA) quantifies the environmental impact of end-to-end business products and services, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished goods. Relying on data about a company’s processes and from thousands of sources, LCA aims to answer questions such as:

• Which product designs and material selections are the most sustainable ones?  
• Which processes have the lowest consumption of land and water resources?
• Which manufacturing and supplier strategy has the best carbon footprint?

Conventional LCA measures the impact of what has already been done and stands apart from day-to-day business activities. But with advanced digitalization, LCA can do so much more.

Virtual twin experiences are precise science-based computer models and simulations to virtually test products, service ideas or designs. Then to engineer, manufacture and market them computer based — all without any physical prototype or operations. LCA as part of virtual twin technology makes environmental assessments available from as early as the ideation stage, and then to every member of the innovation process downstream.  

Embedding LCA within the virtual twin — as Dassault Systèmes’ Sustainable Innovation Intelligence solution does – introduces a host of new possibilities for a net-zero economy. To consistently deliver accurate insights, Dassault Systèmes has partnered with ecoinvent, an environmental database provider with a diverse repository of high-quality lifecycle information.

Equipped with complete LCA data and a unique virtual twin offering on the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform, companies are better poised to innovate towards circular product lifecycles, gain a competitive edge and win the climate fight.

View our infographic to see how the Sustainable Innovation Intelligence solution powers your environmental efforts.