Improve your Life Cycle Assessment
Life cycle assessment is an effective tool for improving the environmental footprint of your products. Analyzing the environmental impact of all stages of the product's life cycle it is the key tool to more sustainability. We will be happy to advise you on how our LCA software can support your project.
Highlights of our LCA software
Life Cycle Assessments with integrated cost analysis
Convince your management by making concrete statements which impact the improvement measures will have on the costs of the product.
Umberto LCA+ enables a comprehensive integrated cost analysis (e.g. for Life Cycle Costing). This enables you to create different scenarios with regard to technology, legal, market, price and demand developments with regard to costs and environmental criteria.
Thus you can combine economic goals with an increase in sustainability of your products.
Integration of pre-existing primary data
You‘ve already gathered data for your LCA in Microsoft Excel? Great! – then you‘ve already accomplished the first step.
Our Live Link connection lets you link cell data from Microsoft Excel with your Umberto model. Any data changes within the Excel worksheet, such as production volumes or material use of your products, automatically updates the data within Umberto LCA+. We also offer customized options for interfacing with other tools like SAP or other systems.
Feel free to ask us about it!
Download free trial version for Life Cycle Assessment & product sustainability
Just download your free trial version of our LCA tool. You can test it for 14 days and start with a first analysis of your environmental impacts.
A factor for success: integrated databases
Both the ecoinvent and GaBi LCA databases can be used to provide background data for creating a full-scale Life Cycle Assessment. This choice of databases, already available within the Umberto LCA+ software, always provides you with just the right data.
Overview of LCA databases
Are you looking for an initial and quick estimate of the environmental impacts? With a "screening LCA" you can minimizes the required effort, complexity, and data collection. It only takes the main materials used in a product into consideration and Global Warming Potential (GWP) values are used for the calculation. The so called “ecological rucksack” of the material already incorporates upstream and downstream chains using global averages. This allows a quick overview and helps to identify hot spots that should be investigated in more detail.
Presenting environmental potentials in a nutshell
You want to visualize the results of your Life Cycle Assessment project convincingly and in a straight forward way? Then you should show the environmental impacts of your product as a Sankey diagram. It easily presents and communicates the relevant findings and interrelationships.
Of course, you can easily export all results to Microsoft Excel or create a print-ready image file. The Umberto LCA+ software will help all interested parties to be on the same page when it comes to a comprehensive systems understanding.
Further information about the tool Umberto LCA+
Would you like to learn more about Umberto LCA+? Then please have a look at our product brochure. All functions and features of the LCA software can be found in the data sheet.
Application examples
Life Cycle Assessment of Pipe Systems
HOBAS Engineering a leading manufacturer for GRP pipe systems from Austria and the Norwegian supplier for unsaturated polyester resins Reichhold had a joint mission. They asked themselves which alternative for unsaturated polyester resins would be more environmentally friendly, the usage of standard-, recycled PET or bio-sourced material. The software Umberto supported them to find an answer to this question. The project is furthermore a good example for data exchange along the supply chain for conducting an LCA and that cooperation with suppliers can be worthwhile.
Life Cycle Assessment for Fujitsu computer hardware
Fujitsu, the Japanese producer of technology products and solutions worked on a LCA project together with the bifa environmental institute. The task was to carry out a Life Cycle Assessment study for computer hardware made by Fujitsu. The software Umberto was used for the project and showed that the greenhouse gas emissions (or product carbon footprint) are the most relevant indicator and impact category for the environmental performance and that the use phase has the lion’s share of the total carbon footprint with approx. 50 %.
Umberto LCA+ the most visual LCA software
How does a Life Cycle Assessment work?
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), is a method to calculate the environmental impact of a product over its entire life cycle. In this context, the term 'product 'also includes services. Taking the entire product life cycle into consideration - from resource extraction to production, use, and disposal – guarantees an integrated evaluation of all inputs and outputs, thus making sure negative environmental impacts aren't shifted to other life cycle phases of the product. This methodology is defined in the ISO 14040/14044 DIN standard. Each LCA starts with setting the goal and scope of the particular study. In some instances, for example, it is sufficient to limit the system boundaries to the 'cradle-to-gate' approach rather than analyzing the entire product life cycle ('cradle-to-grave' ).
What is a Life Cycle Assessment software?
Umberto LCA+ is a versatile LCA software that allows you to calculate Life Cycle Assessments. You can also use this LCA tool to calculate Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) and Product Environmental Footprints (PEF), if your business has advanced to following these standards. It can also be used to find carbon footprints.
LCA software enables you to create a model of your entire product system. Using Umberto LCA+, you start by generating a material flow network. Integrated databases such as ecoinvent or GaBi are useful in realizing the system's boundaries. These databases already contain a large number of data sets, allowing you to easily visualize the background systems.
The next two phases of LCA, the life cycle inventory analysis and the life cycle impact assessment, are completed for you by the software. You then interpret and evaluate the results. The LCA software has functions to make it easy to evaluate the results in a way that they can actually be applied, for example, in the reduction of waste emissions. One of these functions is representing results as a Sankey diagram, which is helpful in securing an intuitive understanding of the outcome. Whether you plan to use the results of the LCA software analysis in your sustainability reporting or would like to discuss them with your colleagues – they enable the viewer to see at a glance where the critical points within your production system are. In the end, the software promotes a greater systems understanding and helps create more transparency.