A life cycle assessment answers a question that sounds simple and isn’t: what is the total environmental impact of this product, across everything it takes to make, move, use and dispose of it?
Ten years ago in India, LCA was mostly an academic exercise. Now we get inquiries every month from manufacturers whose European or Japanese customer has asked for a product carbon footprint, or who need an Environmental Product Declaration to bid on a project, or who are staring down CBAM.
Here is what the work actually involves.
What LCA measures, and what it doesn’t
An LCA quantifies environmental impacts across a defined portion of a product’s life. Not just carbon. A proper LCA covers global warming potential, acidification, eutrophication, ozone depletion, water use, resource depletion and often several more.
Most people who ask for an LCA actually want the carbon number. That is fine, and a carbon footprint is a legitimate single issue LCA. But if you are going to build the inventory anyway, running the full impact set costs very little extra and occasionally changes the answer. We have seen a product that looked good on carbon look bad on water, which mattered a lot to a client operating in a water stressed district in Gujarat.
An LCA does not tell you whether a product is “sustainable”. It tells you where the impacts sit. What you do with that is a business decision.
The four stages under ISO 14040 and 14044
Every credible LCA follows the same four phase structure. If somebody offers you an LCA that skips one, walk away.
Stage 1: Goal and scope definition. Why are you doing this, who is the audience, and what exactly are you measuring? This is where you fix the functional unit and the system boundary. It sounds like paperwork. It is the single most consequential stage, and the one clients want to rush.
Stage 2: Life cycle inventory analysis, or LCI. Collecting every input and output across the boundary. Raw material quantities, energy consumption, water, transport distances, emissions, waste streams. This is 60 to 70 percent of the effort on a typical project. It is also where the study lives or dies, because modelling cannot rescue bad data.
Stage 3: Life cycle impact assessment, or LCIA. Converting inventory data into impact categories using characterisation factors. Kilograms of methane become kilograms of CO2 equivalent. Kilograms of sulphur dioxide become acidification potential. This part is largely computational, done in software.
Stage 4: Interpretation. Working out what the results mean, running sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, checking completeness and consistency, and drawing conclusions you can actually defend. If the study is going to be publicly disclosed or used in comparative claims, ISO 14044 requires a critical review by independent experts.
System boundaries, and why the terminology matters
The boundary decides what gets counted. Get it wrong and your number is not comparable to anything.
Cradle-to-gate covers raw material extraction through to your factory gate. This is the most commonly requested boundary in India because it is what customers, EPDs and CBAM all need. We wrote a full explainer on cradle-to-gate in life cycle assessment.
Gate-to-gate covers only your own processing steps. Narrower, useful for internal process improvement and for slotting your data into a customer’s larger study. Our gate-to-gate LCA case study walks through how that plays out in practice.
Cradle-to-grave adds distribution, use phase and end of life. Necessary for any product where the use phase dominates. If you make motors, pumps, appliances or vehicles, a cradle-to-gate study is telling you about the small end of your impact.
Cradle-to-cradle treats end of life as feedstock for the next cycle rather than as disposal. Relevant for genuinely circular systems, which are rarer than the marketing suggests.
The functional unit, which is where studies go wrong
The functional unit is the quantified performance you are measuring against. Not “one ceiling fan”. Something closer to “delivering a specified airflow for a specified number of operating hours”.
Get this wrong and comparisons become meaningless. Comparing one kilogram of two materials tells you nothing if one of them needs half the mass to do the same job. I have reviewed studies where a client concluded a material switch would cut impacts by 30 percent, when the actual answer once the functional unit was corrected was closer to zero.
Why Indian manufacturers are commissioning LCAs now
Customer requirements. A multinational buyer asks its supply base for product carbon footprints. This is the most common trigger we see, and it usually comes with a deadline that does not account for how long data collection takes.
CBAM. The EU wants embedded emissions per tonne of covered goods. That calculation is an LCA in everything but name. Detail in our post on what Indian exporters must do before the 2026 CBAM deadline.
Environmental Product Declarations. Increasingly required in construction tenders, particularly for green building certification. An EPD needs a verified LCA behind it, following a product category rule.
BRSR Principle 2. Product life cycle disclosures sit under sustainable goods and services. Not every filer needs a full LCA, but the questions push in that direction.
Internal decisions. Which material, which supplier, which process route. Honestly this is the best reason to do one, and the least common motivation for starting.
Data sources, and the India problem
Commercial databases like ecoinvent, Sphera and others provide background data for materials and processes. Software like SimaPro, GaBi and OpenLCA does the modelling.
Here is the catch. Most background datasets are built on European or global average conditions. India’s grid emission factor, transport profile, and process technology mix are all different. Using a European electricity dataset for an Indian factory will give you a number that is defensible to nobody who looks closely.
For any material or process that drives a meaningful share of your result, you want primary data from your own operations plus India specific background data where it exists. Where it does not, you document the proxy and run a sensitivity check. That documentation is what separates a study that survives review from one that doesn’t.
What an LCA project actually looks like
Rough shape, for a single product with cradle-to-gate boundary:
Scoping and functional unit definition takes a week or two, mostly in conversation. Data collection runs four to eight weeks and depends almost entirely on how quickly your plant and procurement teams can pull figures. Modelling and impact assessment takes two to three weeks. Interpretation and reporting adds another two. Critical review, if you need it, adds four to six on top.
So a straightforward single product study runs roughly two to three months. Multi product studies run longer but benefit from shared background modelling. We ran a multi category study covering pesticides, electrical cables, telecom cable, switchgear and ceiling fans for manufacturing clients, and the second and third products always move faster than the first.
The bottleneck is almost never the modelling. It is getting the plant to give you twelve months of consistent consumption data at the right level of granularity.
Questions we get asked
What is life cycle assessment in simple terms? A structured way of adding up the environmental impacts of a product across its life, from raw materials through manufacturing and use to disposal.
What are the four stages of a life cycle assessment? Goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. Set out in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044.
How long does an LCA take in India? Typically two to three months for a single product cradle-to-gate study. Data collection is the long pole, not the analysis.
What is the difference between LCA and carbon footprint? A carbon footprint is a single impact category. An LCA covers several, including water, acidification and resource use. Every product carbon footprint is a restricted LCA.
Do I need ISO certification to do an LCA? No. ISO 14040 and 14044 are standards for how the study is conducted, not certifications you hold. What you may need is third party critical review, particularly for public comparative claims or an EPD.
Can an LCA be used for CBAM reporting? The underlying inventory work overlaps heavily, but CBAM has its own prescribed methodology and boundaries. An existing cradle-to-gate LCA gives you a strong head start rather than a finished answer.
Bilancia Consulting is an Ahmedabad based sustainability and ESG advisory firm. We conduct life cycle assessments for Indian manufacturers across chemicals, electricals and industrial products, and support GHG accounting and sustainability reporting. If a customer has asked you for a product carbon footprint or an EPD, a short call will tell you what data you need to start pulling.
Call +91-9510144494 or email general@bilanciaconsulting.co.in