6. Life cycle assessment – Bilan Carbone

To reduce the environmental footprint of a product, to identify opportunities for optimizing a system or to make a choice between two options, life cycle assessment (LCA) is useful.

Following France's Grenelle Environment Round Table, the Bilan Carbone is widely used by manufacturers, and is often the only reference in terms of environmental performance.

• The difference between these two approaches

  LCA and Bilan Carbone calculations are based on similar approaches. The Bilan Carbone takes into account only greenhouse gas emissions. LCAs, on the other hand, calculate the impact on other important categories for the planet, such as human toxicity, ecotoxicity, resource depletion, land use, acidification and so on. More than a dozen impact categories are used in an LCA, compared with a single...