Getting started guides

You certainly already have some economic bookkeeping in your company. It is also possible to track and monitor the environmental effects that your operations have. Here we give you guidance on some central tools that are often used to evaluate the environmental impact related to products.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool to monitor the environmental impact of a product or service through its entire life span, from raw material extraction to end of life. An LCA allows you to take into account a range of impact categories such as global warming, acidification, land use etc.

A Carbon footprint also monitors the environmental impact of products and services in a life cycle perspective, but in this case only those emissions that affect global warming is taken into account.

In an Eco-Efficiency Assessment (EEA) you can relate the environmental impact of a product to the product value.

Our guides are intended to provide support on how to get started using the above tools: where to find data, how to use the results, etc. For each tool, you can also find examples of experiences from using the tools at AkzoNobel and SCA.