Over the past three decades, life cycle assessment has proliferated as a sustainability tool. Most LCA are conducted on specific products, although a greater number have started to attempt to harmonize and generalize LCA findings across a particular product category or industry sector. There have been few, if any, attempts to translate the overall learnings from LCA research into major guiding principles to broadly assist in environmental decison-making. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of environmental impact wisdom and rules-of-thumb that has been developed within our community that are largely unknown to those outside the environmental community. There are any number of insights that our community finds mundane that would be surprising to members of the general public.

This workshop will invite participants to step outside the boundaries of product-specific LCA and take a broader view of what foundational knowledge and guidance we have learned after conducting thousands of LCAs.

This workshop will ask participants to propose and debate a series of high-level statements on major environmental lessons we have learned. For example, do we typically expect upstream supply chain transportation to dominate an LCA? How important is the use phase vs. end-of-life in consumer-facing products? Are there specific types of emissions or tradeoffs that we typically observe in certain categories of products that may be important? What inputs typically have outsized contributions to a product's impact? What are some broad life cycle principles that we would like the public to know?

At the conclusion of the workshop, we will determine if there is a consensus on any statements or principles and discuss potential future steps to disseminate those consensus statements more broadly.