Life-cycle Analysis (LCA): Challenges and Solutions

As defined by leading designers at the LCA workshop – Part of Design Council’s Design for Planet Festival in Dundee, November 2021

This ethos has led to Protolabs working with Design Council at the Design for Planet Festival in Dundee in November 2021. As part of this two-day event, we hosted a life-cycle analysis (LCA) workshop – a knowledge-sharing activity that drew on the experiences of the leading designers attending. At the workshop, firstly, people were divided into groups of four based on four of the key areas of LCA: resources and materials, production energy efficiency, minimising waste, and end of life.

Secondly, each group was invited to list their main LCA challenges in relation to the group title. And thirdly, each group was then asked to identify solutions to each of the problems listed by another group. These challenges and solutions identified in the workshop form the basis of this Learning Guide.

The following chapters include more detail about this event at the Design for Planet Festival, a description of LCA and then the knowledge revealed by the LCA workshop itself. The final chapter offers further reading on LCA, including the InspirON Sustainability Series from Protolabs and other valuable resources available from Design Council.
Ultimately this document intends to support design engineers in their efforts to be more sustainable in their work. Knowledge sharing is key to this endeavour and I hope you glean something very useful from the following chapters. It is often exciting work being a designer, but the role also carries with it an increasing responsibility to support society’s shift to net zero carbon emissions