Environmental Impact Assessment of 100% British Wool insulation

Wool Insulation Wales produces insulation that is made of 100% British Wool. The objective of this project is to perform a preliminary environmental impact assessment of this product, following the Life Cycle Assessment methodology (as described in the ISO14040:2006) from cradle to gate. The impacts of the use phase will not be included to the assessment at this stage. This analysis will allow us to:

Compare the performance of the woollen insulation with commercial conventional insulation products, which are available in the UK market (such as rockwool); and
Identify the environmental hotspots, i.e. the stages of the production line that have the highest share of the environmental impact.
At the end of the product, a Microsoft Excel-based toolkit will be created and provided to the company. This will enable Wool Insulation Wales to create alternative scenarios for their product, after the end of this project, and assess their environmental performance, accommodating alternative manufacturing configurations and potential planned modifications in the production line,

This analysis will provide to Wool Insulation Wales: (a) insight on which processes need to be improved to increase the overall environmental impact of their product; and (b) the required (quantitative arguments) to promote their insulation to their clients, based on its sustainability performance.

The main envisaged risk with a Life Cycle Assessment, in general, is the lack of primary or secondary data. For this specific project, primary data will be provided by our industrial partner so we do not expect any lack of data for this aspect of the inventory. However, the accumulation of secondary data will be based on information available on commercial LCA databases, involving a relevant risk. This project will, thus, allow us to test if such a product can be modelled using these databases, and, therefore, if it is worth implementing the same approach to a wider range of products.