Why Organisational LCA is Aerospace’s next sustainability frontier

Every aircraft that rolls off a final assembly line carries a footprint that extends far beyond its own bill of materials: into the mines that supplied its titanium, the factories that machined its brackets, the data centers that ran its digital mock-up, and the offices where its next variant is already being designed. Product-level Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has long given engineers a way to measure the first of these. What it has never done well is capture the second: the environmental signature of an organisation as a whole.

That gap is what Organisational Life Cycle Assessment (O-LCA) is built to close. And after a decade as a niche academic exercise, it is starting to look less like a research curiosity and more like the methodological backbone the aerospace sector will need for credible, comparable environmental reporting.

A young method reaching maturity

O-LCA takes the logic that engineers already trust for products, cradle-to-gate or cradle-to-grave impact accounting, and applies it to an entire company: its sites, its suppliers, its support functions, its R&D. The idea is simple. The execution, until recently, was not.

The field remains genuinely young. Barely more than forty published studies exist worldwide, concentrated overwhelmingly in food, consumer goods and building materials. Aerospace has, so far, produced none. Yet the normative scaffolding has quietly caught up: ISO 14040/44 lay the general LCA foundations, and the newly published ISO 14072 (2024) adds organisation-specific rules on boundaries, portfolio definition and reporting. Alongside these, the UNEP/SETAC O-LCA guidance and the European Commission’s Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) framework closely tied to the PEF/PEFCR system already familiar to product teams give practitioners a converging, if not yet unified, rulebook.

In other words: the theory is no longer the bottleneck. The practice is.

Where it actually breaks: data, not models

Ask anyone who has attempted an O-LCA at scale what stopped them, and the answer is rarely the impact assessment methodology. It’s the data.

Large organisations must consolidate information from thousands of internal processes and an even larger web of suppliers, at a level of granularity no single LCA database was ever designed to handle. Scope 3 emissions, upstream and downstream, are notoriously prone to double counting when inventory rules aren’t tightly governed. Data quality varies wildly between primary measurements, secondary databases and rough proxies, often stitched together from incompatible sources and versions. And industrial suppliers, understandably protective of proprietary process information, are frequently reluctant, or simply unequipped, to share the granular data an O-LCA demands.

The conclusion is unambiguous: without disciplined data governance, O-LCA risks becoming either impossible to execute or too fragile to trust for real decisions. For a sector as complex and globally tiered as aerospace, that risk is amplified several times over.

Designing an O-LCA that aerospace can run

Aerospace supply chains are long, deeply tiered, and safety-critical, with a large share of lifetime environmental impact occurring during aircraft operation, a phase the manufacturer influences but does not control. A workable O-LCA framework for the sector has to make deliberate, defensible trade-offs rather than chase theoretical completeness.

Scope. A cradle-to-gate organisational boundary, covering raw materials, part manufacturing, assembly, internal logistics, overheads and R&D, offers the most pragmatic starting point. In-service operation is left to airlines’ own accounting, avoiding both double counting and unproductive disputes over who “owns” an emission. End-of-life is handled with a mass-based weighting: the non-recycled fraction of an airframe stays attributed to the manufacturer, keeping eco-design accountability intact.

Supplier data. Three models were weighed against each other. Having the focal company collect everything itself doesn’t scale across an aerospace supply base. Asking every supplier to run their own full O-LCA sounds appealing but collapses under real-world variability in methods and transparency. The approach that actually holds up is a middle path: suppliers transmit standardised raw data (energy, materials, process volumes) while the prime contractor centrally applies one consistent impact model across the entire chain. It shifts less burden onto suppliers than a full O-LCA mandate would, while giving the focal organisation the methodological control needed to keep results comparable and defensible.

Indicators. Rather than drowning decision-makers in dozens of metrics, seven priority impact categories emerge as the sector-relevant core: climate change, fossil resource depletion, water use, aquatic ecotoxicity, energy consumption, fine particulate matter, and human toxicity. This reflects where aerospace manufacturing actually does its damage energy- and materials-intensive processes and where regulatory and reputational exposure is highest.

Communication discipline. It’s tempting to compress results into a single sustainability score. The evidence says: resist it. Weighting impact categories into one number introduces subjectivity and can quietly bury the trade-off that mattered most. Normalisation against familiar benchmarks and careful grouping for dashboards are useful communication aids, but the underlying multi-criteria results need to stay visible and available.

What this means for PLM practitioners

For those of us working at the intersection of PLM and sustainability, O-LCA is a natural extension of a shift already underway. The product BOM is becoming an “impact BOM,” where material and process choices carry environmental metadata alongside functional and geometric data. PLM platforms are increasingly the natural connective tissue between MES and ERP operational data on one side and LCA modelling on the other, reducing the manual data wrangling that currently makes organisational-scale studies so labour-intensive. And eco-design decisions such as material substitution, design for disassembly, or manufacturing route selection only reveal their true trade-offs when viewed at organisational scale, where a burden shifted from one plant or supplier to another finally becomes visible.

An emerging academic thread

This is also, encouragingly, becoming a live subject of academic-industry dialogue in the very region where much of European aerospace engineering is trained. In Toulouse, CIMPA PLM Services’ ongoing engagement with the aerospace research and teaching community, including exchanges with ISAE-SUPAERO, reflects a broader recognition that O-LCA cannot mature through consultancy or industry effort alone. It needs the kind of rigorous, long-horizon methodological testing that academic partners are best placed to provide: pressure-testing allocation rules, validating supplier data models, and building the sectoral case studies that simply don’t exist yet. As PLM providers, integrators and engineering schools increasingly compare notes on where lifecycle data infrastructure needs to go next, this kind of applied collaboration is likely to be one of the more productive routes toward the first published aerospace O-LCA.

The real task ahead

Nothing here suggests O-LCA is ready to be mandated wholesale across the aerospace industry tomorrow. What it does suggest is that the sector now has enough methodological convergence, through ISO 14072, OEF, a workable scope definition, and a realistic supplier data model, to stop treating O-LCA as a research question and start treating it as an engineering and governance one.

There are encouraging signs that the industry is already moving in this direction, if not yet at the organisational scale. The International Aerospace Environmental Group (IAEG), which brings together stakeholders from across the aerospace industry, has an active work group standardising LCA methodologies, communication protocols and data formats, and has published a voluntary framework aimed at improving consistency along the supply chain. These efforts aim to enable end-to-end environmental assessments based on primary, product-specific data, reducing dependence on generic databases. For now, this work is focused squarely on product LCA rather than the organisational level, but it constitutes exactly the kind of shared methodological groundwork that a future sector-wide O-LCA protocol would need to build on.

That, ultimately, is the next move: extending this same spirit of voluntary, industry-wide standardisation from products to organisations. A common data template, a shared set of allocation rules, a reference impact model that primes and suppliers alike can build against. Until that exists, every organisation attempting an aerospace O-LCA is essentially building its own dialect. Standardising that dialect, quickly, and with the same rigour the sector already applies to airworthiness, is the work that will determine whether O-LCA becomes a genuine strategic tool or stays a well-documented academic exercise.

About the Author

Evgeniya Burimskaya is Head of Innovation at CIMPA PLM Services and Theme Moderator for PLM and the Circular Economy at the PLM Green Global Alliance.

With nearly 20 years of experience in digital transformation, PLM strategy, and sustainability, she works at the intersection of innovation and industrial transformation. Her current focus includes Digital Product Passports, Life Cycle Assessment, and the role of digital technologies in enabling more sustainable and circular product ecosystems.