Sustainability 101: What are life cycle assessments?

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Every product has a story. From the raw materials used to create it, to the energy it consumes, to where it ends up when it’s no longer useful— each stage impacts the environment. Life Cycle Assessments, or LCAs, help us estimate that impact and identify areas for improvement throughout a product’s life cycle.

LCAs help businesses understand the environmental footprint of their products, processes, or services across every stage of their life cycle. From energy use to water consumption, LCAs reveal critical data that can drive more sustainable decisions.

What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?

A Life Cycle Assessment evaluates the entire life cycle of a product, including*:

1. Raw material extraction. One example is sourcing minerals, metals, or natural fibers.
2. Materials and product manufacturing — such as converting materials into finished products.
3. Transportation and distribution — including the journey to stores, warehouses, and customers.
4. Usage — such as resources consumed when a product is in use.
5. End-of-life — what happens to a product after use: for instance, recycling, reuse, or landfill disposal.

LCAs estimate the environmental impact at each stage, providing a picture of a product’s footprint. Businesses rely on LCAs to identify where the greatest impacts occur and find opportunities to reduce their environmental impact.

* Note, the examples listed above are not exhaustive and are meant to be illustrative.

What do LCAs estimate?

LCAs go beyond just evaluating a product’s carbon footprint to include topics such as water consumption, energy demand, resource depletion, waste generation, and pollution. Let’s take the example of a seemingly simple T-shirt to explore an example of what can be measured:

Global Warming Potential (GWP): LCAs estimate the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) that contribute to climate change. For a T-shirt, these emissions occur at every stage—from producing cotton to powering factories and transporting the finished product.

Blue Water Consumption (Water usage): LCAs estimate how much fresh water is consumed during manufacturing and product use. For example, producing enough cotton for a single T-shirt can require thousands of liters of water, with additional water used for dyeing, washing, and cleaning the shirt over its lifetime.

Primary Energy Demand (Energy consumption): LCAs evaluate the energy resources used to produce, distribute, and power a product. For a T-shirt, this includes running textile machinery in factories and transporting the shirt around the globe.

Ecotoxicity (Waste and pollution): LCAs estimate pollutants that affect air, water, and land. In T-shirt production, chemical dyes and by products can potentially pollute water sources, and the shirt itself could eventually end up in a landfill.

Abiotic Depletion Potential (Resource depletion): LCAs estimate the use of finite resources like metals, minerals, and fossil fuels. In our T-shirt example, growing cotton depletes soil nutrients, while producing synthetic fibers like polyester relies on fossil fuels.

By capturing this full range of environmental impacts, LCAs empower businesses to prioritize more sustainable actions across their operations and product design.

Why LCAs matter for businesses

LCAs can be a powerful tool for driving innovation and reducing environmental impact.

They can offer tangible benefits for businesses aiming to meet their sustainability goals. By identifying the most resource-intensive phases of a product’s life, companies can target environmental “hotspots” and implement changes such as using renewable energy to power manufacturing sites or switching to more sustainable materials that reduce their overall impact. These insights can drive innovation, enabling the design of products that are more energy-efficient, durable, and circular with reduced resource-intensiveness and environmental impact.

For example, it’s estimated that over 80% of product-related environmental impacts are determined during the design phase.¹ LCAs can help compare alternatives and understand trade-offs when selecting components, process steps or disposal types. By integrating LCAs early in the design process, companies can improve sustainability outcomes.

Publishing LCA results helps to enhance corporate transparency and support environmental reporting. Sharing these reports builds trust with customers, employees, investors, and other stakeholders, while ensuring compliance with global sustainability standards and reporting frameworks.

How are LCAs conducted?

Conducting an LCA is a structured process that involves gathering data across every phase of the product lifecycle, assessing environmental impacts, and interpreting the results to support initiatives like net-zero goals and circular product design.

LCAs follow globally accepted standards, such as the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) 14040 and 14044. There are other standards that are also based on ISO’s framework.

Cisco’s approach to Life Cycle Assessments

At Cisco, LCAs play a key role in our efforts to estimate and minimize the environmental impact of our products.

Recently, we announced that Cisco has made these assessments publicly available, sharing LCAs for a number of our products on the Sustainability Resources section of our website. Cisco has already completed 23 LCAs across 8 business units in the past two years and plans to publish additional assessments across key product lines in 2025. Sharing these results supports transparency and demonstrates our commitment to measurable progress.

While many technology companies publish LCAs, Cisco is one of the first to produce them for networking equipment, such as Catalyst switches. Cisco’s Chief Sustainability Office and Supply Chain Sustainability teams continue to partner with our colleagues across the company to produce these reports, and we plan to continue publishing them as they become available.

LCAs are part of how we approach sustainability holistically. LCA data supports our circular design strategy— to develop products and resources that are reused, repurposed, and kept in circulation for as long as possible. By evaluating everything from material sourcing to end-of-life disposal, we gain critical insights that guide our product design and innovation.

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