As a result of rising awareness about climate change, energy and emissions have lately been a bigger part of the lifecycle conversation. Consider how much more difficult it is to predict energy and emissions over the whole automobile manufacturing process. Energy, such as electricity or natural gas consumption, is continuously flowing, but emissions are rarely measured precisely.
You may have a product or service that saves prices, energy, or emissions but there might be a areas where there is a large impact to environment, which can be reduced, to improve the overall carbon emission. LCA helps us to understand the areas where there are significant opportunities in reducing the overall carbon footprint of the product or building from cradle-to-cradle approach.
Understanding the environmental impacts of your building, products or services throughout their entire life cycle will enable you to make the right decisions on climate and sustainability.
Cradle-to-Gate : Cradle-to-gate only evaluates a product until it leaves the production and is transferred to the end user. This entails skipping the usage and disposal stages. Cradle-to-gate analysis may considerably decrease the complexity of an LCA, allowing for faster discovery of insights, particularly concerning internal processes. Cradle-to-Gate is mostly used for studying products that are going for Environment Product Declaration (EPD)
Cradle-to-Cradle : Cradle-to-cradle is a term used frequently in the Circular Economy. It’s a cradle-to-grave variant that replaces the trash step with a recycling process that turns it into useful material for another product, basically “closing the loop.” It’s for this reason that it’s also known as closed-loop recycling.
Gate-to-Gate : In product lifecycles with numerous value-adding activities in the middle, gate-to-gate is occasionally utilized. Only one value-added step in the manufacturing chain is examined to keep the evaluation simple. These evaluations can then be put together to form a broader Life Cycle Assessment