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Insights

Life Cycle and Risk Assessments: Different Tools for Better Decisions

Keith Weitz Director, Sustainability and Resource Management
Emily Thompson Environmental Engineer
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Key Takeaways

  • Life Cycle Assessment and risk assessment answer different questions. LCA evaluates environmental impacts across a product's life cycle, while risk assessment focuses on safety, exposure, and compliance.

  • LCA is valuable for understanding trade-offs. It helps organizations compare materials, products, and processes to identify opportunities for reducing environmental impacts.

  • The best decisions often require both approaches. Combining LCA and risk assessment can provide a more complete understanding of environmental performance and real-world risks.

What Is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool for understanding the environmental impact of products from raw material extraction to end of use. It helps companies evaluate environmental burdens and has become a central tool for sustainable packaging and product decision-making. It is also increasingly relevant in policy contexts, as some packaging Extended Producer Responsibility programs, including Oregon’s Recycling Modernization Act, are beginning to require life cycle evaluations.

LCAs include two primary components:

  • A Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) that tracks the resource and energy inputs, as well as emissions and material outputs, across the product life cycle; and
  • A Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) that translates energy use, emissions, and material inputs into potential environmental impacts.

Together, these components make LCA a powerful comparative tool that helps answer questions such as: 

  • Where are the greatest sources of resource use, energy use, emissions, and environmental impacts across the life cycle?
  • Which potential material, product, or process has the lowest environmental footprint under a consistent set of assumptions?
  • What trade-offs emerge across different types of impact when comparing competing packaging options?

The answers to these questions help companies evaluate options, make more informed decisions, and respond to consumers’ sustainability expectations. 

What Questions Can a Life Cycle Assessment Answer?

The LCIA is a key part of what makes LCA valuable. By linking inventory data to potential environmental impacts, it helps show how emissions and resource flows contribute to impacts across categories such as land use, resource depletion, and water use. This makes it easier to compare options across life cycle stages and impact categories, highlighting key trade-offs to consider. 

However, LCIA results can also be challenging to interpret and communicate, as they are typically comparative and model-based. This can create confusion when users try to interpret LCA findings as direct answers to safety, exposure, or regulatory compliance questions. 

For example, what happens when a company wants to answer questions such as:

  • Is this product safe?
  • Does exposure exceed regulatory thresholds?
  • Is the risk acceptable for a specific local community?

In these cases, LCA should be paired with risk assessment (RA). These two methods address similar topics, including chemicals, emissions, and human health, but they answer different questions. 

Life Cycle Assessment vs. Risk Assessment: What's the Difference?

LCA is strongest when the goal is to identify improvement opportunities and avoid shifting environmental burdens or impacts across the life cycle, while RA is most useful when the question is about safety and compliance under defined exposure scenarios. Used together, they give decision-makers a more complete picture.

What Each Method Captures

  • Resource use and emissions across the life cycle
  • Multiple environmental impact categories and cross-media trade-offs
  • Upstream and downstream life cycle stages
  • Exposure pathways, receptor populations, and scenario-specific conditions
  • Hazard, dose-response, and risk characterization
  • Location- and population-specific context

Typical Decision Uses

  • Compare alternative products, materials, systems, or management options
  • Identify life cycle hot spots and improvement opportunities
  • Evaluate trade-offs across life cycle stages or impact categories
  • Evaluate whether exposure may exceed health-based or regulatory thresholds
  • Assess safety or acceptability under defined exposure conditions
  • Support site-, facility-, or community-specific decision-making

For example, a recycled material might have a lower overall carbon footprint across the life cycle (an LCA advantage), but RA might flag elevated exposure concerns for specific contaminants if that material is used for food packaging. Both can be true because they answer different questions.

Some LCA outputs—especially human health impacts—can appear to answer risk questions, but they are comparative estimates rather than safety determinations for a specific use, exposure scenario, or community.

When Should You Use Life Cycle Assessment, Risk Assessment, or Both?

Before selecting an approach, start with the question that you need to answer. Match the tool—LCA, RA, or both—to that question. Since results depend on assumptions, data quality, and modeling choices, decision-makers should invest in uncertainty and sensitivity analysis and avoid presenting single numbers without context. 

Used responsibly, LCA remains one of the strongest tools we have for understanding environmental trade-offs, as long as it is not used as a substitute for risk or safety assessment. Ongoing improvements in geographic differentiation, data quality, biodiversity modeling, and integration with RA will make LCA an even more useful tool for real-world decision-making.

Improving Packaging and Material Decisions with LCA and Risk Assessment

RTI International helps consumer goods companies evaluate trade-offs and real-world risks across products, packaging, and materials. By integrating expertise in LCA, exposure and risk analysis, sustainable materials, and systems-level decision support, RTI helps clients make informed choices about product design and safety. 

Learn more about RTI’s scientific solutions for evaluating trade-offs and sign up for The Growth Brief Newsletter to get insights in your inbox. 

Inform your product and packaging strategy with systems-level insights. Contact us today to get started.

Disclaimer: This piece was written by Keith Weitz (Director, Sustainability and Resource Management) and Emily Thompson (Environmental Engineer) to share perspectives on a topic of interest. Expression of opinions within are those of the author or authors.