If you work in sustainability, product, or compliance, you’ve heard the term LCA everywhere.
But what does a Life Cycle Assessment actually involve? What data do you need? What makes one credible? And how do you use it to make real product decisions, not just a PDF report?
This whitepaper breaks it down clearly, using practical examples from the fashion and textile industry, and shows how LCAs sit at the core of Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), France’s Environmental Cost score (Ecobalyse), and Digital Product Passports.
What’s Inside
- What an LCA really measures: From raw materials to end-of-life. Understand system boundaries, functional units, and why they matter for PEF, French scores, and DPP data models.
- The 4 mandatory steps of an ISO-compliant LCA: Goal & scope, inventory, impact assessment, interpretation. If it doesn’t follow this structure, it won’t support credible environmental scoring.
- The 16 environmental impact categories used in PEF: Climate, water, land use, toxicity, resource depletion and more, plus how midpoint and endpoint methods lead to a single score.
- Why LCAs are hard in textiles: Global supply chains, mixed materials, supplier data gaps. Learn how primary vs secondary data and databases like EF and Ecoinvent affect accuracy.
- How brands use LCA results: For eco-design, product comparison, environmental labelling (including France’s Environmental Cost), Digital Product Passport readiness, and better product decisions.
Why This Matters Now
LCAs are moving from sustainability teams into everyday product workflows.
Brands are using product-level impact data to guide design, support environmental labelling, and prepare for Digital Product Passports. At the same time, PEF and France’s Ecobalyse system are making LCA-based scoring part of standard operations.
In fashion and textiles, LCAs provide the backbone connecting eco-design, French Environmental Cost scores, PEF, and DPPs into a single product data foundation.
If you’re working on product environmental footprint, textile LCAs, French Environmental Cost scoring, or Digital Product Passports, this is a solid starting point.
Download the whitepaper to understand how LCAs power PEF, Ecobalyse, and DPPs, and how to use them in practice.
