Product life cycle assessment
Know your environmental footprint
One powerful and widely recognized tool to measure the potential environmental burden is the methodology of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It is a common scientific approach, standardized by the International Standard Organisation (ISO) (ISO14040 & ISO14044) to measure the environmental impact, objectively. It is also known as eco-balance and cradle-to-grave analysis. The technique assesses prior chosen environmental impacts, such as global warming potential, associated with all the product stages, from raw material extraction, processing, manufacture, distribution, … to the end-of-life.
LCA studies have been conducted at Constantia Flexibles since mid-2015 via an innovative semi-automated meta-model. This enables us to provide customers and other stakeholders with information on the potential environmental footprint of our diverse packaging products by allowing an evaluation of the individual production processes, raw material inputs, waste handling possibilities and country specific settings to a high level of detail.
In order to determine the environmental impact of flexible packaging in the whole supply chain and to work out potentials for optimization we actively encourage the implementation of LCAs coordinated by associations and other stakeholders.