Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an environmental management tool, which is used to assess environmental impacts of products and services in their entire life cycle from "cradle to grave", i.e. from raw material extraction, through production and use, to final disposal or recycling.
Novozymes uses LCA to assess and compare the environmental impact of conventional and enzyme assisted solutions delivering the same benefit to a user in industry, agriculture and private homes.
The conventional solution can for instance be laundry washing at high wash temperature, the enzyme assisted solution can for instance be wash at lower temperature with extra enzyme added, and the common user benefit can for instance be clean laundry.
LCA results used in Novozymes’ external communication have been subject to external critical review according to ISO 14040 standards or published in the peer reviewed International journal of LCA.
LCA studies performed by Novozymes address four environmental impact categories
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Global warming |
Acidification |
Nutrient enrichment |
Smog formation |
and three resource categories
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Fossil fuel |
Agricultual land |
Minerals etc. |
The outcome of the studies briefly presented here are extracted from full LCA reports which cannot be released to the public because they contain confidential production data etc. More details of the LCA studies can, however, be found in summaries of these reports as they are gradually
published.