WINTRUST: Wintersport Resource Efficiency and Improved Circular Economy - A practical guide and recommendations to improve LCA quality in the wintersport industry

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a method to quantify environmental impacts is increasingly required and valued by industrial stakeholders for environmental reporting and decision-making. At the same time, it imposes challenges to practitioners and users given the complex nature of the methodology. This report represents a summary of the analysis of multiple options concerning selected methodological choices in LCA. The results of the discussions on the feasibility, advantages and disadvantages are documented to justify the recommendations drawn on conducting LCA.
All work has been performed in 2024 within the scope of the LCA working group in the WINTRUST project on “Wintersport Resource Efficiency and improved Circular Economy”. The working group is led by Montanuniversität Leoben – Processing of Composites and Design for Recycling group, and comprises multiple stakeholders from the wintersport hard goods industry, namely Atomic Austria GmbH, Blizzard Sport GmbH, Fischer Sports GmbH, Head Sport GmbH, namely Leki Lenhart GmbH. Two major suppliers of the industry (Isosport Verbundbauteile GmbH and Hexcel Composites GmbH & Co KG) joined the working group at a later stage to discuss data exchange and modelling of recycling topics.
The methodological choices discussed in this report include i) Life Cycle Impact Assessment Method selection, ii) Software selection, iii) Database selection, iv) Supplier data requirements, v) Filling data gaps, and vi) Modelling recycling. These topics have been selected in a two-step procedure: A questionnaire served to obtain information on topics to in- and exclude as well as to receive a first ranking of topics, which has been voted for prioritization after intensive discussion during one of the physical working group meetings.
The analysis of the topics is in chronological order and follows a similar procedure, which is documented in this report. After a brief introduction to the methodological choice in scope, different options are analyzed in the frame of the working group needs. Advantages and disadvantages are discussed among all working group members during the meetings, often in a comparative manner. One or multiple illustrative examples aim to further deepen the understanding for the methodological choice and generally increase comprehensiveness of the report. Examples are derived from multiple sources and fictitious use cases. To sum up the finding and provide helpful guidelines on LCA conduction, recommendations, that use the ISO-terminology (shall, should, may, can) are derived from the contents discussed during the working group meetings. The final recommendations were unanimously approved by all working group members via voting.
Limitations of the work at hand arise from (mainly temporal) resource constraints, researcher bias, simplified application examples and the generally attributional nature, as consequential modelling as another LCA school of thought has been excluded early in the project. Therefore, this report claims neither to be complete nor to depict all options in a balanced and detailed way. It rather aims to build upon existing work by giving a non-exhaustive overview of LCA methodological choices prioritized by the company members from the wintersport hard goods industry and providing insights into the rationales that the recommendations follow. All recommendations of the report have been jointly elaborated and developed by the involved industrial and academic partners, which emphasizes the multiple reciprocal benefits and synergy effects of cooperation to produce meaningful results and reflect on research activities.