What is life cycle assessment (LCA)?
Life cycle assessment (LCA) measures a product's environmental impacts across every stage of its life, from raw materials to end of life.
Why it matters
An LCA follows a product from raw material extraction through manufacture, transport and use to disposal. An assessment that covers every stage is called cradle-to-grave. LCA is standardised internationally in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, and the GHG Protocol Product Standard applies a life cycle approach to greenhouse gases.
For cloud hardware, LCAs show how much of a server's footprint comes from making chips, memory and other parts before it is ever switched on. That share is easy to miss when only electricity is counted. For a cloud customer, it falls under Scope 3.
An example
Manufacturers publish LCAs for specific products. Dell has published critically reviewed LCAs for several PowerEdge server models, and NVIDIA has published product carbon footprints for its HGX H100 and HGX B200 systems. Studies like these break a footprint down by component and life stage, so others can reuse parts of the result for similar hardware.
How Greenpixie uses it
Greenpixie applies LCA principles to the embodied emissions of cloud hardware. Each component draws on published life cycle data:
- power supplies, chassis, fans, motherboards and expansion cards from Dell's PowerEdge LCAs
- GPU memory, board and cooling from NVIDIA's product carbon footprints
- CPU packaging and RAM from LCA studies by Gröger et al. at the German Federal Environment Agency
- transport and end-of-life shares from published LCAs of each hardware type
End of life follows the GHG Protocol Product Standard's recycled content method, so no recycling credits are taken.