Water Footprint, Life Cycle Assessment, Life Cycle Costing

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method that allows establishing the environmental impacts of a product or a service during its entire lifecycle from raw materials to final disposal, or a subset of the lifecycle. Life Cycle Assessment is intended to measure overall environmental performance and avoid burden shifting. This allows improving overall environmental performance, when the essential environmental impacts are identified.  Full Life Cycle Assessment takes into account various categories of environmental impact. Simplified LCA can be focused on a single environmental performance category, such as greenhouse gas emissions ie. carbon footprint or water footprint.

Water footprint tells the amount of water consumed in the activity of an organization or consumed and embedded in the production of a product or a service. Water footprint consists of all water used and embedded in the production of raw materials, such as crops, or in processing such as manufacturing and assembly. Different types of water resources and different geographical regions of water consumption are separated; also any water purification is accounted for. Bionova is a member of the Water Footprint Network.

Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is the economical approach to life cycle assessment. In Life Cycle Costing all the costs incurred during a lifecycle of a product or a service are identified, accounted and categorized. Life cycle costing can be used in making investment decisions, product development, marketing and in mapping value chain environmental and energy risks.

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