What Is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?

Sustainability is fast becoming a priority for consumers, food retailers, and commercial food producers. Companies today are taking steps to minimize the materials and energy used to reduce their carbon footprint. To do this, however, you need a way to measure environmental impact. How do you quantify this in your products, from sourcing to packaging and everything in between?

To reach sustainability goals, companies must have clear metrics. This includes the accountability that comes with third-party review and analysis. Doing this work is worth the time and effort. Showing there is data behind the claims you make helps build trust with customers.

At Lacerta, one of the tools we use to measure the environmental impact of our products is a life cycle assessment calculator. This third-party analysis has given us valuable insights into our operations and can be helpful for food producers and retailers. This post will discuss how it works and how it can help your company reach its sustainability goals.

What Is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?

Life cycle assessments determine a product's or service's environmental impact, considering all stages, including raw material extraction and processing, manufacturing, distribution, use, to finally, recycling or disposal.

LCA assessment is a common step for companies that want to use eco-friendly packaging and promote sustainability efforts in their marketing materials. ISO standards specify that Type I environmental labeling must have third-party certification to verify a product's compliance against a set of criteria.

To better understand our product's life cycle impact and meet the demand for more sustainable packaging, Lacerta invested in LCA software. The Trayak's Eco-Impact LCA tool assesses all our materials and products, including our PET and post-consumer (PCR) plastics. By drawing from global data accepted industry-wide, we can help our customers better understand the true environmental impact of the plastic packaging they use.

How LCA Can Help You Reach Your Sustainability Goals

Lacerta makes LCA insights available to our commercial food producer customers. They may use the data to make packaging decisions, seeking post-consumer plastic (PCR) options we have available or opting for smaller packaging.

It also helps commercial food producers and retailers with messaging and marketing. Whether talking to a business-to-business customer or marketing to consumers, this data is valuable for creating compelling and trustworthy sustainability messaging.

Lacerta Is Seeing Results

Lacerta understands that sustainability is essential to today's food producers and retailers. That's why we've committed to offering 100% of our products to include up to 100% recycled, recyclable materials by 2025. Lacerta's use of post-consumer recycled material currently saves 324 million bottles from landfills, or over 5,173 tons of greenhouse gasses, every year.

This commitment goes beyond the packaging we make. We've also committed to making sustainability a part of every aspect of our business, from recycling materials to reducing energy consumption.

Lacerta can help your company reduce environmental impact while maintaining packaging quality and competitive pricing.