If you’ve begun the process of creating a Life Cycle Assessment or Product Carbon Footprint, these are the three standards you should begin to understand.

Life Cycle Assessments and Product Carbon Footprints are complicated; there are many choices to be made about methodology, data sources, and reporting, that will influence the results and how they are presented. Fortunately, there are three internationally accepted standards which set up “rules for the road”:

ISO 14040: Environmental Management — Life cycle assessment - Principles and framework.
ISO 14044: Environmental Management — Life cycle assessment — Requirements and guidelines.
ISO 14067: Greenhouse gases — Carbon footprint of products — Requirements and gudielines for quantification.

Published by the International Organization for Standardization following a consensus-based process involving dozens of countries, these three standards are the basis of all reputable LCAs and Product Carbon Footprints, and with good reason.

ISO 14044: The Foundational LCA Standard

Of the many sustainability-related standards I’ve worked with, none are as well written and just as plain useful as ISO 14044. This standard, first published in 2006, has been the undeniable standard of practice since its publication nearly 20 years ago. Among its key additions to LCA standardization include:

Very detailed terms and definitions relevant to LCA and Product Carbon Footprints.
Detailed requirements covering the four phases of LCA: Goal & Scope Definition, Life Cycle Inventory Analysis, and Life Cycle Impact Assessment, and Life Cycle Interpretation.
Very useful supporting guidance on how to complete good LCAs.
Requirements for reviewing LCAs used for claims, comparisons, and other purposes.
Language which is readily adapted to checklist form, making verification against the standard straightforward and easy to complete.

Any LCA that you want to use for any purpose should conform to ISO 14044; and if you want to make public claims of any kind, a verification against this standard is a must-have.

ISO 14044 Amendments

Two amendments to ISO 14044 have been published in recent years. The first, from 2017, creates an Annex C dictating some requirements about how single-issue LCA “footprints” are to be construed; this is most relevant to the publication of single-issue GHG Life Cycle Assessments and Product Carbon Footprints. The second amendment, from 2020, provides some helpful terminology updates and creates Annex D, providing more guidance on allocation practices. Neither of these amendments fundamentally change the requirements and guidance of the LCA main standard, but rather provide helpful guidance for specific use cases and technical methodology.

ISO 14040: The Philosophical LCA Standard

While ISO 14044 provides the nuts-and-bolts details of how to do LCA, ISO 14040 (2006) provides overarching guidance on the key principles that go into LCA (like the Life Cycle Perspective, Relative approach and functional unit, and Iterative approach), and its key features. It also provides a general discussion of some of the more technical, yet important, concepts underpinning LCA, like the concepts of product systems, functional units, and system boundaries.

While ISO 14044 describes techniques used for how to do LCA, ISO 14040 describes why many of the techniques are used in LCA. While ISO 14044 should be the basis of any published LCA, ISO 14040 can help you, as the user of a LCA, understand what goes into the practice.

ISO 14067: The Product Carbon Footprint Standard

The sky-high demand for GHG emissions information for products led to the desire for a standard focusing only on the Product Carbon Footprints of products. ISO 14067, published in 2018, meets this need, supplementing ISO 14044 and ISO 14040 with terms and definitions specific to carbon footprints, as well as more specific technical requirements for publishing Carbon Footprints of Products and accompanying technical reports.

While ISO 14044 is a normative reference (which means that any ISO 14067 conformant Product Carbon Footprint must also conform to ISO 14044), there are unique requirements in ISO 14067 making the standard, to a large degree, stricter and more detailed. In practice, ISO 14067 is the go-to standard in specific use cases, such as the certification of product carbon footprints for use in Carbon Neutral claims under PAS 2060 or ISO 14068. But “single-issue” GHG LCAs can be published conforming to ISO 14044 and its first amendment, without reference to ISO 14067.

Where to get Your Copies

The standards are all publicly available, for a fee, at the ISO website page for each standard: ISO 14040, ISO 14044, and ISO 14067.

Need help?

You can read our series of blog posts to learn more about Product Carbon Footprints, Life Cycle Assessments, what is required to create them. Or you can contact us directly if you need support, at info@novacreatio-sustainability.com or visit our Contact Us page.

ISO 14040, 14044, and 14067