Technical consultancy services
LightCoce offers a holistic consulting approach to all technical aspects of innovative projects, from life cycle analysis and cost to health and safety issues, eco and energy efficiency, regulatory compliance etc., adjusted to each project’s special needs, through a wide network of experienced and specialized partners across Europe.
Emerging risks (e.g. emission and exposure to nanomaterials) may arise due to the development and use of new technologies and therefore, a comprehensive risk assessment is required to ensure their safe development/usage. In this sense, a multi-tiered risk assessment approach will be offered to address all aspects of the proposed technologies allowing the identification of potential hazards (eg: release of nanoparticles) and risk management by the deployment of appropriate mitigation strategies.
The following services will be available:
- Support on the identification of and compliance with the regulatory context related to health, safety and environment (EU regulations, directive, and other acts) of the technologies under development (production processes)
- Support on the implementation of health and safety risk assessment and management following the principles and guidelines of the standard ISO 31000:2018 “Risk management – Guidelines” and ISO/TR 13121:2011 “Nanotechnologies – Nanomaterial risk evaluation”
- Monitoring activities (workplace nanoparticle monitoring)
Understanding the environmental impacts of a product throughout its entire life cycle can help a company make the right decisions on climate and sustainability.
LCA measures the environmental impact of a product or service over its full life cycle, from raw material extraction to end-of-life (cradle-to-grave) or over a subset of the life cycle (eg. cradle -to-gate). Based on normalised standards (ISO 14040 and ISO 14044), LCA takes in consideration several impact categories, being the base for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) well-known in the construction sector. In addition, LCA can be used to support decision to improve the overall environmental performance of a product, avoiding problem-shifting, since it identifies the environmental life cycle hot-spots and allows to compare alternative production routes or functional equivalent products.
Further to this, LCA can be a valuable tool to stimulate innovation by supporting sustainable choices on product design, development and manufacture. With the arrival of net zero targets, new ideas, designs, products and processes will be required to facilitate the transition to a low carbon economy, and LCA can be a vital first step in this process.
LightCoce has deep expertise and can carry out streamlined and comprehensive LCA studies, tailored to the client’s needs.
Life Cycle Costing (LCC) takes into account the costs incurred along the life cycle of a product or a service including different fixed and variable costs (eg: acquisition, consumables, equipment, investments, labour, organizational use, maintenance, and disposal) or a part of it to identify the main cost drivers and support more cost-effective product development and investment decisions.
LightCoce can support its clients, by analyzing the production, maintenance and operation costs for the whole life of a product under consideration.
Eco-efficiency analysis assesses the value created in relation to the environmental burdens generated by a product or system. To support ecoefficiency improvement the analysis identifies which process step(s) are associated with the main environmental burdens and the main costs in the studied product. Comparing alternative production routes can support decision making to increase the ratio of value created per environmental burden generated.
LightCoce experts have the right combination of life cycle assessment and business competencies which enables them to conduct ecoefficiency analyses and support the clients with portfolio decisions in the context of their integrated product policy.
LightCoce provides a regulation compliance service to help customers commercialize the products under development. These products must accomplish the international regulatory framework to be commercialized in European and non-European countries. While some product regulations affect the whole European territory, like Directive 2001/95/EC on general product safety, REACH, CE marking and Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and packaging waste, other regulations are specific for each country.
One of the obstacles to overcome to bring to market new products is the inexistence of a complete list of regulations that the new products must fulfill in each of the target markets. The regulation compliance service will cover this gap by searching and identifying the regulations that can affect the commercialization of the products under development (concrete, conventional and advanced ceramics). In this way the customers will be offered a complete advice service to market the new products in accordance with the existing regulations in each of the destination countries.
Certification, standardization and market entry for new products involve complex and often lengthy processes. The extensive knowledge and experience of the LightCoce network will provide guidance through the pre-normative and standardization landscape. In doing so, delays in the process, for example due to missing parameters or performance of redundant tests, can be avoided.
LightCoce offers a pre-normative research service that consists of a meticulous and accurate assessment of the compliance with existing standards of essential and relevant product properties as well as of the respective test methods.
In case the parameters and test methods are not covered or not fully covered by a harmonized standard, LightCoce may offer help in starting the process of a new standardization proposal.
The standardization proposal will be addressed to the technical assessment body (TAB) for the respective product area which will issue the European Technical Assessment (ETA) on the basis of a European Assessment Document (EAD). This represents the basis for the CE marking of components and products. Thanks to the longtime expertise and membership of several partners in various standardization committees (both on the national level as well as in CEN and ISO TCs), the process of choosing the relevant standardization committees will be simplified.
