Help Improve Label Sustainability With A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology that analyzes environmental impact associated with each stage of a product’s lifecycle from raw material extraction, manufacturing and transportation, to use and end-of-life. These stages can also be referred to as “cradle-to-grave" to emphasize the idea of covering the product’s lifespan from start to finish. LCAs provide calculations addressing aspects of the product’s environmental impact, including its biodiversity and land or water usage. It’s important to understand, however, that aspects like carbon footprint are just one component being assessed when developing an LCA, and you need to assess more to get the full picture. Focusing on only one metric can lead to unintended consequences, such as reducing emissions but increasing water scarcity or harming biodiversity. A full LCA helps ensure that decisions are balanced and holistic to prevent trade-offs that shift environmental burdens from one area to another. By considering many aspects (i.e. energy use, resource depletion, toxicity, land and water impacts), you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the product’s true footprint and can make choices that genuinely minimize overall environmental harm.

At Bostik, we understand it may sound intimidating to collect the data for your end-use label LCA; that’s why we’re already generating the information you’ll need about our adhesives’ environmental impact to help you get the data you’re looking for and allow you to stay at the forefront of accomplishing sustainability goals.  

As the adhesives solutions segment of Arkema, Bostik is part of the Arkema Group’s strong commitment towards decarbonization along its whole value chain. With Arkema, Bostik is targeting to achieve 90% of its sales covered by an LCA by 2030. In 2023, Arkema launched the CACTUS* digital tool, which aims to automate the calculation of the Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) of the Group’s solutions. More recently, Arkema obtained a third party certification for the CACTUS tool as well as for the methodology that we use for our Carbon Footprint calculation**. 

By taking these important steps as your adhesive supplier, we can share data and help you complete your own LCA report for your end-use labels. In particular, as of the end of 2025, most of the data has been collected or modeled for our pressure sensitive adhesive (PSA) solutions for label construction.

When you request a Life Cycle Assessment, we use our product calculations and our data collection to determine the totals based on your specific adhesive product. This includes collecting the data for customized formulations or varied production processes that may not otherwise be thoroughly documented, helping to prevent data gaps and develop a comprehensive cradle-to-gate LCA for your label adhesive; this complete process takes typically 6 months. 

Once you are ready to make improvements, our technical support team is also here to help. From customized formulations and testing materials in our facilities to working with your plant to help ensure our adhesives run smoothly on your lines, we are here to help you initiate changes with your adhesives to improve your environmental footprint.  

Interested in learning how collecting LCA data on your adhesive can help you create a full report on your end-use label? Contact a Bostik expert to find out how we can make the process easier and help you contribute to providing transparent data on your label’s environmental impact.