LCA guidance coming for labels industry

The joint task forces from the US and EU associations surveyed its membership to reveal: 86 percent of respondents do not currently use LCA. 62 percent of respondents plan to use LCA in the future.

The LCA project will serve as a means for defining the environmental footprint of a label construction and will allow converters and brands to select constructions that will be less impacting on the value chain and our planet.

Said Calvin Frost, TLMI and Finat environmental committee chair, 'It says to me, that this is another reason why membership to organizations like Finat and TLMI is so important. This LCA project supports every discipline of our industry. It's good for the industry.'

Explained Thomas Hagmaier, president of Finat and Hagmaier Etiketten & Druck in Germany, 'This is a tool which helps the specific way we can save the environment at our company.'

Transparency of environmental impacts is crucial to meeting LCA standards and impact reduction goals being more frequently established at every stage in the value chain. The project will alleviate the risk of conflicting communications to consumers and 'double' requests to suppliers.

The associations have hired the third party sustainability consultancy PRé to lead the LCA efforts. PRé will create a harmonized LCA sector guidance document that provides step by step guidance through the LCA process, include functional unit and system boundaries and set a standard for quality requirements.

Leading standards like ISO, PEFC, FSC, GHG protocol and Ecolabel are being taken into account as well as sector relevant standards such as PCR and LIFE.

Training will be made available through webinars and during a workshop at the Finat Technical Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

LCA Case Studies: CCL & Constantia

Converter participants, CCL in Europe and Constantia Flexibles Labels Division in the US, will supply case studies for the document to serve as an application example.