Life Cycle Assessment of end-of-life tyres
What is a Life Cycle Assessment?
When you manufacture a product, the process will have an environmental impact on the planet. One way to determine the scale of this impact is to complete something called a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
LCAs are useful because they offer a holistic view of the environmental impacts of a product or service throughout its entire life cycle. They can cover different life cycle stages, from the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, use, all the way to end-of-life management outcomes.
An LCA can gather data on aspects like resource consumption, carbon emissions, water usage, and the use of recycled materials. These are known as Environmental Impact Categories.
What are the benefits of a Life Cycle Assessment?
Knowing the life cycle impacts of a product can highlight the benefits of using certain products over others, due to a reduction in emissions. LCAs can also demonstrate where an organisation can make improvements on the environmental impacts of a product or service.
For example, a business could use LCA data to identify an impact hotspot in the life cycle of their product, and work on actions to reduce or avoid this impact.
How can we use Life Cycle Assessments for end-of-life tyres?
End-of-life tyres can be used in different end-markets, often replacing conventional materials. There have been various LCAs completed that consider the environmental impacts of tyre-derived materials, however, the process of collecting life cycle data can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. This may limit the ability of a business to gather data to complete an accurate LCA of their product.
Good quality, verified data for tyres is important for the industry, and a key driver for the work outlined below.
What research has Tyre Stewardship Australia carried out in relation to Life Cycle Assessments?
TSA has worked with LCA experts, Edge Impact, to produce the following LCA report, capturing several Tyre Derived Materials (shred, granules and crumb rubber) and Products (Roads and infrastructure).
The study considers many scenarios and compares the environmental impacts of products with tyre-derived materials to conventional products.
More FAQs
As well as communicating environmental impacts, LCA information is highly regarded and can be used in many ways, such as:
- Developing Environmental Product Declarations, which are standardised and independently verified documents that communicate the key results of an LCA.
- Providing the necessary data for Regulatory Compliance with environmental regulation, ensuring a business can operate legally and sustainably. This is particularly important as more organisations focus on addressing their Scope 3 emissions, to comply with mandatory climate-related disclosures.
- Providing environmental data to the Government that is often necessary for Public Project Tenders.
- Enabling Manufacturers to compare different materials, work on efficient resource use and create lower impactful products.
- Providing insights into the environmental performance of suppliers, allowing Procurement Teams to make informed decisions that align with sustainability goals.
- Improving the Marketability of a product, based upon a product’s sustainability and communicating those results is crucial to gaining and maintaining a competitive edge.
- Identifying inefficiencies and areas for resource optimisation through LCAs can lead to significant Cost Savings. Companies can reduce waste, energy consumption, and material costs, improving their bottom line.
- Building trust with consumers and stakeholders via Transparent Communication of the environmental impacts of products.
- Publishing and sharing methodology will improve data quality over time and establish Industry Benchmarks.
- No two LCAs are the same, LCA methodology is specific. Other published LCAs and data that cover the use of tyre-derived products in products may not be directly comparable due to varied methodological choices and different data sources. This does not imply that one set of data is correct while another is incorrect.
- ISO 14040:2006 requires that a mandatory critical review be conducted for any LCA studies used to make a comparative assertion that is disclosed to the public.
- LCAs can be time consuming and expensive, so understanding what data is already available can inform a decision on whether to undertake an LCA and how to go about it.