Strong partnerships and smart use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can turn complex sustainability challenges into practical, commercially viable solutions. Fortescue, a global leader in the resources sector, teamed up with thinkstep-anz to build LCA into their decision making and move faster towards their decarbonisation goals.
In this webinar, Ilka Mitchell, Green Certification Manager at Fortescue and Nicole Sullivan, Impact Director at thinkstep-anz discuss how collaboration, shared learning and robust LCA practices are helping Fortescue to build internal capability and tackle some of their toughest sustainability challenges.
Webinar poll: What opportunities are you hoping to unlock with an LCA?
Before we started, we asked participants what they hoped to get from an LCA. Key themes emerged:
→ Better decisions: Guiding investments, early design choices and product development
→ Spotting improvements: Finding hotspots, cutting emissions and driving long-term gains
→ Building knowledge & collaboration: Sharing insights across teams and breaking down barriers between stakeholders
→ Supporting reporting & innovation: Informing EPDs and providing actionable data
These responses set the stage for the webinar – turning LCA data into action.
Watch the webinar and scroll down for a summary
Ilka shared what made the journey work:
Start simple and focus on credibility: When they began, there was no internal LCA capability at Fortescue. The team focused on partnering with both internal and external experts to fast-track capability and build credibility.
Ask for help and build relationships: LCA relies on good data. By partnering with engineers, procurement, operations and R&D teams, they not only gained access to the information they needed, but also found natural allies that could help them demonstrate the business value of LCA. ‘These allies helped us create pull rather than push for an LCA within the business.’
Focus on practical wins: Instead of producing big reports that sit on shelves, they delivered small, useful pieces of work that supported real decisions. Over time, this built momentum.
Use LCA to ask better questions: LCA doesn’t make decisions for the business – it informs them. It highlights hotspots, shows trade-offs and helps teams think more clearly about the consequences of different technology and investment choices.
Nicole explained how to move from ‘doing an LCA’ to making it meaningful:
Get the basics right and focus on meaning: Follow the core steps of LCA and keep interpretation front and centre. Data on its own isn’t enough – it needs to be translated into clear insights. ‘LCA will only have impact if we illuminate our results with meaning.’
Set clear principles: Together, the teams developed ten guiding principles to make LCA useful to the business – and easily understood. Fortescue’s LCA approach is all about using clear, reliable and practical analysis to make better decisions, spot trade-offs and turn results into truly useful insights.
Today, LCA is part of how Fortescue evaluates new technologies, supports its climate transition planning and engages suppliers. Most importantly, it has helped the business navigate complex decisions with more confidence – and ask better questions along the way.