“…not everyone is aware of LCAs or knows how to find them. Not everyone knows how to take them apart and what type of information they can provide. This is a particularly problematic issue for fence line communities who just want to know what’s going on in their part of town. How can fenceline communities get a hold of LCAs done for projects nearby?”
~ Alex “Spike” Spike, Climate Justice Coordinator, Air Alliance Houston
Typically, the person featured in our newsletter answers a series of questions provided by the Global CO2 Initiative (GCI). However, the format for this special feature on Alex Spike and Air Alliance Houston, is a little different.
Air Alliance Houston is a non-profit advocacy organization working to reduce the public health impacts from air pollution and advance environmental justice. GCI is a non-profit working to advance carbon capture and utilization as a mainstream solution to climate change. In order to facilitate more dialog between community advocates and academic or technical non-profits, we agreed to each ask each other three questions. When a few clarification questions arose, Spike graciously agreed to answer additional questions.
Spike’s questions and GCI’s answers are featured in this newsletter. GCI’s questions and Spike’s answers will be featured in the next newsletter issue.
Spike amplifies the connections between air quality, climate change and environmental justice by coordinating community-based campaigns that educate and empower communities to take action for their health. Their background is in mathematics and atmospheric sciences with a concentration in air pollution meteorology. They also completed air pollution research with the University of Houston over the Houston Ship Channel. In their free time, Spike can be found reading or walking their dog.
Spike: So we’ve talked a lot about the sort of outcomes and impacts that a new development can have when you’re handling nascent technologies and innovative fuels, and why an assessment of risks and impacts is especially important. With that in mind, my first question is, what is a life cycle analysis and what does it mean for fence line communities?).
GCI: A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a holistic analysis of the potential environmental impacts (both positive and negative) of products or services during their entire life cycle. The life cycle begins with extraction of resources necessary to make the product or service (sometimes called “cradle”) and ends with the end of the product or service lifetime (sometimes referred to as “grave”.) It also includes all stages between the two end points, namely, production, distribution, and use.
Additionally, a Life Cycle Assessment includes affiliated entities that play a supporting role (e.g., raw materials producers, suppliers, or waste management).
The condensed definition is that an LCA tries to holistically and systematically measure the environmental impacts (or potential impacts) related to a product or service.
An analogy may help to explain how an LCA works. Instead of thinking about a technologically complicated widget making factory, let’s look at a process that is more familiar to most of us: making cookies.
When you are considering the environmental impact of making a batch of cookies, you need to consider your ingredients. What was the environmental impact of growing the wheat? Of turning the wheat into flour? Of creating packaging for the flour and then putting the flour into the packaging? And what was the environmental cost of bringing the packaged flour to a store?