Life cycle thinking

Life cycle thinking is an approach to becoming mindful of how everyday life affects the environment. This approach evaluates how both consuming products and engaging in activities impacts the environment but it not only evaluates them at one single step, but takes a holistic picture of an entire product or activity system. This means when talking about a product and taking a life cycle thinking approach, what is actually being evaluated is the impact of the activity of consuming that product. This is because by consuming a product, a series of associated activities are required to make it happen. For example, the raw material extraction, material processing, transportation, distribution, consumption, reuse/recycling, and disposal must all be considered when evaluating the environmental impact. This is called the life cycle of a product. The overall idea of making a holistic evaluation of a system's effect can be defined as life cycle thinking. The goal of life cycle thinking is to make people and companies more aware of how their actions impact the environment in a holistic sense rather than a one time pollution that comes as a direct result of using a product or doing an activity at one specific time. Although it is nearly impossible to undergo consumption of anything with no environmental impact, life cycle thinking can help people make better alternative decisions to mitigate their environmental impact. One of the goals of life cycle thinking is to avoid burden shifting. This is to make sure that reducing the environmental impact at one stage in the life cycle does not increase the impact at other places in the cycle. For example, plug in electric cars reduce the amount of gasoline burned but they increase the amount of electricity used which is usually generated by other polluting energy sources such as coal. Life cycle thinking can also demonstrate the benefits to technological innovation. For example, movies can now be downloaded through television service providers and gaming devices which eliminates the need to drive to a DVD rental location. By identifying pollution costs, companies can innovate to mitigate their expenses while consumers can make better alternative choices to mitigate their impact.Life-cycle thinking has applications in many sectors, such as the following:There are many different approaches to life cycle thinking that all involve looking at life cycle-generated impacts and ways to minimize these impacts. An important component to life cycle approaches is avoiding burden shifting, in other words, ensuring that improvements in one stage are not achieved at the expense of another stage. Approaches of impact measurement focus on decreasing environmental impact and resource use throughout all stages of a process.There are multiple situations to which life cycle thinking can be applied, including the everyday life of consumers, business and government policy. By applying life cycle thinking to multiple aspects of the community, consumers, businesses and governments can have a largely positive aspect on the environment. This is true even if the steps taken to apply life cycle thinking are small.Many consumers, when making decisions on what to buy and what not to buy, consider the environmental impact of the particular product. Policy makers recognize this desire, and act to create policy that not only helps consumers do this, but will do so while keeping a growing economy in mind.Since life cycle thinking can be involved in the choices of individual consumers, as well as policy makers and businesses, it is very important that people are well informed about the subject and its uses. Increasing awareness of the Life Cycle Analysis technique would allow companies as well as individuals to consider multiple options for a new product. After consideration of all available options, life cycle thinking would encourage selection of the most sustainable option. If more individuals practiced life cycle thinking when looking for new materials or methods, they would be more aware of how the environmental cost of ownership of products can be influenced by the running costs in energy and consumables.