What is Life Cycle Assessment?

&r=1" class="c1">		Life Cycle Assessment is a tool used to determine all the direct and indirect impacts of a product or an activity.
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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), is the process through which the total environmental impacts of a given product or activity are calculated. The underlying philosophy is that the impact of salt, for example, is not just the impact of its production, like fuels or electricity used in machinery. To obtain the total impact of salt, we must add to those direct impacts the indirect environmental burden, which results for example from the production of the machines themselves. LCA is also referred to as “cradle-to-grave analysis”, since it describes and quantifies the impacts of the whole production chain of a product: since the production of its inputs, to its final destiny.

Therefore, the LCA approach tells us that, as consumers, our environmental impacts do not come just from the energy we use and the waste we produce, but also from the products we buy. The concept is widely applied to optimize the environmental performance of products (ecodesign), or to optimize the environmental performance of a company in all its activities.

ECOSALT uses an LCA perspective, in the sense that salt producers must be responsible for the whole production and disposal chain of their products. Therefore, when optimizing processes and activities, they must necessarily take into account the whole chain of events that leads from primary inputs to the final packaging waste.