Life cycle assessment and recycling

LCAs assess the environmental impacts of making, using, and disposing of materials and products.

• •The four stages assessed in an LCA are extracting and processing raw materials, manufacturing and packaging, use during its lifetime, and disposal at the end of its life.
• •Use of water, resources, energy sources, and production of waste can be measured precisely using numerical data.
• •Evaluating environmental impacts such as pollutant effects requires subjective judgment, meaning an LCA is not purely objective.
• •Selective or abbreviated LCAs only evaluate certain impacts and can be misused in advertising to support positive claims (greenwashing).

Reducing the use of finite resources conserves raw materials, saves energy, and minimizes environmental damage.

• •Limited resources such as metals, glass, building materials, plastics, and crude oil products can be preserved by reusing or recycling.
• •Recycling metals saves significant energy compared to extracting them from ores via mining and electrolysis or reduction.
• •Glass bottles can be reused directly or crushed and remelted to make new glass products.
• •Scrap steel can be added to blast furnaces during iron extraction to reduce the amount of iron ore required.