Q&A - WCEF2025 Side Event. Circular Business Design & LCA – Benefits Beyond Compliance
Here we have collected answers to some of the questions that couldn’t be addressed during our WCEF2025 Side Event on May 6th 2025, due to time constraints.
Q: Is it possible that LCA results are contradicting circularity principles? E.g making a product more circular could lead to higher environmental impacts of some categories. If so, what's the approach to follow?
A: First of all, LCA does not contradict circularity principles, because the whole idea of circularity principles it so minimize our negative environmental impacts, by keeping materials and products in use for as long as possible.
LCA can however reveal that a circular business model, or product, might in some cases not be more sustainable than a linear one. A classic example is that of single use plastic shopping bags vs. reusable ones. For a reusable bag to be more sustainable, it has to be used 20-50 times more than the single use alternative. Another example is reusable containers for takeaway food: If they are not in fact returned and reused, and if the return process is not efficient, then single use containers are still less harmful for the environment.
A well done LCA, built on realistic assumptions of human behavior, will capture these cases and help you build a sustainable (circular) business.
Another Important thing here to remember here is that that circular is not the same as recycled or re-used (only). It is about finding a best possible overall solution in terms of environmental impact. Sometimes less material is better (for resource efficiency), sometimes more material (for durability and extended lifetime). There are always difficult trade-offs to be made. Circular Design is about evaluating these different options and choosing the best one, in terms of the overall environmental impact over the entire product lifecycle. And LCA is a tool to understand and evaluate these options.
Q: Doing LCA on a single fashion product isn't time consuming? Especially considering the fast fashion in today's world. What will be the best methodology if I want to measure the environmental impact of a fashion firm?
A: Yes and no. Doing an LCA for a single product can be time consuming, but doing the next one, for another variant of that product, or for a similar product, can in the best case be done in a few minutes. There are ways to scale up your LCA's very efficiently, and produce hundreds or thousands of LCA's with a relaively low effort, without sacrificing quality. Our software partner Earthster will actually host a webinar about this topic on June 25th 2025.
Q: Would it be appropriate to use a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach for our products to calculate overall emissions, instead of calculating Scope emissions separately?
A: Yes, you can do that. An LCA will give more accurate information about your emissions than for example a spend based GHG calculation. GHG scope 1, 2 and 3 is calculated for an organization, whereas LCA's are usually made for individual products, but you can also do an Organizational LCA. This will give you all the GHG insights you need and much more. We have actually created an e-book about this topic that you can access here.
Q: What kind of expectations you have for EU's Clean Industrial Deal's actions on circular economy by the end of 2026 as the green taxation was mentioned there?
A: There are quite high hopes that the Clean Industrial Deal finally manages to shift the taxation towards usage of materials, rather than current taxation of mostly labour, which would enable reducing some of the negative impacts and extensive reosurce use caused by businesses to the environment.
For example VAT could be lower for circular materials and products, such as products designed for repair, reuse or recycling, compared to products consisting of a lot of virgin materials.
Under the CID also Extended Producer Responsibility will be expanded to new product groups such as textiles, batteries and construction materials.
Overall the Clean Industrial Deal is expected to level the playing field for circular products, and provide much needed financing for circular investments. The Clean Industrial Deal is expected to be based on the circular economy model. This is a good example of the fact that the Circular Economy WILL be the futre economic model - it is not only about whether your company's product belogs to the ESPR priority product groups or not. All the regulation will be moving to the direction of favoring circularity.
Q: Who can do LCA and does Consultancy require any certification / accreditation to conduct LCA for companies products/ services.
A: There is no certification required to start doing LCA's. It is however important that you know what you are doing. LCA is not rocket science, but it is a bit complex and if you don't have the needed education, there is a significant risk for making some serious mistakes that might have severe consequences.
According to the ISO 14040 series and other standards that define LCA's, a critical review by an independent and competent third party needs to be performed before results are communicated to the public. The process of Third party verificaion for Environmental Product Declarations (EPD's) is similar, and for thesem the 3rd party verifier needs to be approved by the program operator under which the EPD is issued.
In Europe and many other regions, there is currently no official certification of LCA practitioners. In the US, LCA practitioners can get certified by ACLCA (American Center for Life Cycle Assessment). There are a few different levels of certification and those are recognized in some other geographies too, at least in Australia.
Q: Could you share some insight on challenges about the supply chain which is sensitive and committed to sustainable objective.
A: Circular Economy requires a different kind of transparency from the companies than what they have provided this far. For example, the Digital Product Passports, which will in the future be required for all products to be sold in the EU market, should include data about the life-cycle of the product and the value chain involved in creating the product. We believe that this will also encourage companies to try to find new kinds of value chain partners who are really committed to sustainability. The value chains needed for circular economy are often also referred to as Circular Business Ecosystems. Designing and developing those ecosystems is also an important part of Circular Business Design.
Q: Why did you say circular doesn't mean it's the most sustainable option! In what sense as circularity has different options!
A: A circular product or business model is not automatically sustainable only because it is circular. In most cases however, circular businesses model are more sustainable than linear ones, as they save lots of energy and natural resources. We should however not just assume that in every case, but really look at the facts and make sure the business model is created in a way that actually ends up being as sustainable as possible.
There are smart circular products and solutions with minimized environmental impact, and less smart ones. For example, if getting recycled materials and recycling them again after end of use requires transporting them around the globe, and recycling technologies that are very energy intensive and polluting, then that would not be a sustainable option, even though some might claim that they are "circular".
There is a possibility for circularity also to be used for "green washing", that is why verifying the environmental impacts with LCA is highly recommended - so that you can communicate that your solution is not ONLY circular but also environmentally friendly.
If we consider also social sustainability (and we should!) that is yet another important topic. Is a circular product, which has been produced with very bad labor conditions, a sustainable product? Maybe not.
Q: How can I get in contact with the speakers?
A: You can for example connect with them on LinkedIn: Paula Fontell, Poul Lindqvist.
Q: How can my company get started with exploring how to move to a Circular business Model?
A: Start by getting in touch with Paula Fontell or someone else at Ethica, to plan your transition with expert support
Q: How can my company get started with doing Environmental Life Cycle Assessment?
A: Upskill some of your employees or hire a young environmental talent at Environmental Impacts Academy.
Environmental Impacts Academy has an LCA implementation roadmap that can be downloaded from our web page.