Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a structured way to quantify environmental impacts across the full life cycle of a product or service. It’s about understanding the true environmental performance behind something – from the extraction of raw materials, impacts from production and processing, packaging and transporting across the supply chain, and waste and recycling management at the end.
While LCA has its roots in industrial manufacturing, it is now widely used across agriculture and food systems. When we hear about comparisons between the environmental performance of different types of protein or crops – e.g. almond versus oat milk – the results are usually underpinned by LCA in some form.
