Life Cycle Assessment
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a systematic approach to evaluating the environmental impact of a product at each stage of its lifecycle, from raw material extraction through production, usage, and disposal. At Seco, we have ambitious targets related to sustainability and a vision to lead the discovery of the future when it comes to manufacturing. Sustainability is complex – there are many aspects to consider with trade-offs and resource requirements making prioritization of actions challenging. Additionally, how can companies communicate the environmental impacts of their products in a “common language” that stakeholders from different parts of the market can understand? This is where Life Cycle assessment can help.
Life Cycle Assessments provide information on a product’s footprint through a systematic approach, which enables an organization to identify opportunities for improvement, optimize resources, and provide customers with transparent actionable data.
Seco is working towards offering Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) for all product groups. The goal is to provide LCA services to help customers make sustainable choices and validate claims of sustainability related to products, including custom Cradle-to-Gate analyses for detailed environmental insights.
In January 2024, Seco launched a pilot LCA project at the insert production at the site in Fagersta. The goal was to understand the LCA process and identify challenges for larger-scale implementation. This helped pinpoint impact hotspots in the factory and highlight the importance of the upstream supply chain.
Combined with Seco’s cutting data engine, a use-phase assessment of the product was further developed, creating a functional unit that can represent both performance and environmental impact.
At the Lottum site, a pilot project was carried out, featuring the first large-scale Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) implementation for the round tool product line. This pilot not only provided valuable insights into the environmental impacts of the manufacturing process but also helped refine LCA on a broader scale. By laying the groundwork for more comprehensive environmental assessments, this project paves the way for Seco's future goal of providing detailed environmental data reporting on a per product basis, ensuring greater transparency and sustainability in Seco’s operations.
Seco will utilize Life Cycle Assessments to provide transparency on the environmental impact of products whilst also utilizing this data to prioritize, drive and validate internal initiatives to drive product and process sustainability.
Life Cycle Assessments allow Seco to provide estimations on the environmental impact of products that can be utilized by customers. This can be used for estimating the impact of purchasing activities with Seco as well as being a communication tool connected to sustainability and machining process impacts. Furthermore, attributes can be added to products to allow for comparison between Seco products and selection of tools on CO2 impact as well as cost. This will cover more of Seco’s standard offering going forward. For now, preliminary results can be shown based on pilots in stationary turning and solid end mills.
A key challenge when it comes to sustainability throughout manufacturing is data. Where are the hotspots? How is CO2 impact of products validated and how are changes made in the portfolio impact Seco and customers’ sustainability? Embedding LCA into Seco’s operations allows answers to these key questions. Based on results, data improvements enables Seco to drive and identify hot spots and key areas for improvement as well as implementing quantifiable improvement, which can be validated by the LCA methodology.
Not only will Seco be able to identify production and process hotspots but can also build knowledge on how changes to the product portfolio and development of new products will influence the environmental impact of the products. By understanding material and process impacts, Seco can more efficiently guide portfolio development to ensure new products align with the high sustainability ambitions. As LCA becomes an embedded practice, Seco can also ensure that all new products have an LCA conducted before product launch. This will offer a strong compliment and support to the existing mandatory sustainability assessment that all new product development projects conduct today.
The Life Cycle Assessment will provide a concrete methodology that will support Seco’s communication around the sustainability of products, the progress towards key sustainability goals such as net-zero products, and ensure that the estimations and reported external progress can be trusted. Although it will not provide 100% accurate estimations, continuous improvement combined with transparency on assumptions, limitations and boundaries provide information that the markets can trust.
Seco supported a customer to understand both the productivity impact and sustainability impact of alternative coolants.
A Cradle-to-Gate LCA on a custom drill was provided as an upstream input, enabling a full life-cycle perspective to estimate the impact of tool life on overall process sustainability.
While the customer was on-site to test the alternative coolant, representatives from Seco’s Sustainability department were present to collect real time data from the test. This data was used to estimate use phase impact including energy and coolant consumption, the effect of cutting data (changes in speed and feed) on productivity, and overall process sustainability.
