Life Cycle Assessment: A Practical Introduction

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is crucial for businesses to help increase resource efficiency and reduce environmental impacts and costs.

On this microcredential, you’ll gain practical skills to help you successfully complete a Life Cycle Assessment. These transferable skills can be applied across different contexts and industries, enabling you to understand the environmental performance of a variety of products and services.

By the end of this microcredential, you’ll be able to apply your strong foundation of knowledge towards becoming a certified or practising Life Cycle Assessment professional.

Learn how to help organisations improve their environmental performance

You’ll start by exploring different types of Life Cycle Assessments before learning how to map and design a flowchart to support the LCA of a product or service.

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to demonstrate the sustainability implications of products and support organisations in understanding their environmental performance and how to improve it.

Understand the importance of inventory analysis

Next, you’ll unpack the international guidelines, product-specific guidelines, and product rules in practice for LCA. You’ll also discover the importance of using inventory analysis and data collection in your impact assessments.

This exploration will ensure you’ll implement the correct Life Cycle Analysis methodologies and standards.

Learn how to present your Life Cycle Assessment results

You’ll then learn how to interpret and analyse LCA outcomes. Through this interpretation, you’ll also learn how to effectively present your results.

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to formulate a strategy for any business to improve its environmental performance.

Master LCA with Deakin University

Finally, you’ll explore project management within the context of LCA and the use of Gantt charts for project scoping.

Guided by the experts at Deakin University, you’ll develop key project management skills which are crucial for Life Cycle Assessment professionals.

By the end of this microcredential, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and practical skills to successfully conduct an LCA and determine the environmental impact of any product or service.

How will Life Cycle Assessment skills help my career?

You’ll explore many different industry perspectives throughout the microcredential to help you understand how to use your sustainability skills across various contexts.

As well as this, you’ll learn a number of transferable skills such as sustainability appraisal, communication skills, critical analysis, and project management to use in a variety of roles to help you develop in your career.

How will I be assessed?

Throughout the course you will build an online portfolio containing elements of conducting a LCA. For your assessment you will create and submit a recorded video presentation and accompanying slides (not exceeding 15 slides/max 10 mins) that describes the analysis and findings of your LCA.

Will I receive university credits?

Upon successful completion of the microcredential and assessments, you’ll receive 0.5 Deakin Credit Points at a Postgraduate level from Deakin University.

You’ll also receive a statement of completion from FutureLearn and a digital certificate from Deakin University.

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Life Cycle Assessment: A Practical Introduction
-This course equips professionals with metrics and tools for responding to the climate emergency and ensuring a sustainable future.