Life Cycle Thinking

Life Cycle Thinking is a different 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.

Life Cycle Thinking therefore also can be applied to the consumption of other socio-economic activities such as watching a movie, making arts and crafts, cooking dinner, or even doing homework. For example, renting a movie, which seems to be a harmless activity, would involve burning gasoline to drive to the video store, using electricity to power the television and DVD player, and consuming power from the remote’s batteries. However, when trying to analyze quantitatively the effects of life cycles, limits to evaluation are subject to what assessment approach is taken because the chain reaction can become so complex that it could require decades to figure out the life cycle of a specific process. Life Cycle Thinking overall is a way to become more mindful of the complexities of consuming products and engaging in activities and how they affect the environment.

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 Life Cycle Thinking's biggest goals 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.

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