EcoEngineers, a Des Moines-based clean energy consulting, auditing and advisory firm, recently launched Life-Cycle Analysis Academies to inform businesses on how to measure the environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product’s life.

Hosting the first of two scheduled academies in Des Moines on June 25 and 26, the firm is aiming to add another “tool in the toolbox” to help businesses progress toward their decarbonization goals, EcoEngineers President Brad Pleima, pictured at right, said.

The academies outline each phase of a life-cycle analysis (LCA), beginning with a goal and scope definition, inventory, impact assessment and interpretation. They also highlight the role of LCA in environmental, social and governance compliance, conservation and the regulations that require an LCA.

“We’re trying to get people the tools to be able to understand how you calculate that [carbon] footprint, what the benefits are, and then are there ways to monetize some of that, or beneficially claim those reductions for your own personal goals,” Pleima said.

The potential cost-saving opportunities from conducting life-cycle analyses range from reducing energy and resource use to minimizing waste to improving supply chain efficiency.

Coca-Cola was the first company to conduct an LCA, completing an internal study in 1969. It compared different beverage containers during the manufacturing processes to determine which had the lowest releases to the environment and which least affected the supply of natural resources.

“The great thing about LCA is it spans across all different industries,” Pleima said. “The tools and the techniques are a little bit different, but the concepts can span across anything. I think fuels is a good one. Utilities, that’s one where they’ve already been producing energy for a while; that’s a natural one. Manufacturing, food and beverage, textiles, agriculture.”

Within agriculture, the goal of an LCA is to be able to pay farmers more for low-carbon farming practices or climate smart agricultural practices, said Jim Ramm, EcoEngineers vice president of U.S. biofuels.

“We need to be able to do that to incentivize that change,” he said. “We’ve known for a long time that climate-smart agriculture is higher yield, is more beneficial, and it has less indirect land-use change impacts. And what we haven’t been able to do until now is incentivize it, to say that we have the data to support what came off of that field and what was the carbon intensity of that crop coming off of that field. And also to have somebody to aggregate that data, like the ethanol plant, like the grain elevator, to be able to bring that together, so it isn’t 200 different reports.

“It’s one report that says from my area, my four-county area, the corn doesn’t have a carbon intensity of 29. Actually, it’s more like 20, and to be able to say to the downstream market because my corn is lower carbon, everything I make here — the distiller’s grains, the ethanol, the biodiesel — is worth more than the carbon market. Then they can make more with their products and they can turn around and pay the low-carbon farmer a little bit more per bushel.”

EcoEngineers will host its second Life-Cycle Analysis Academy on Sept. 4 and 5 in Houston.