Life Cycle Assesment (LCA) Voucher Scheme
About this good practice
LCA brings many benefits such as 1) reduces the overall environmental burdens across the whole life cycle of goods and services, 2) improves the competitiveness of the company’s products, 3) provides a single tool that is able to provide insights into upstream and downstream trade-offs associated with environmental pressures, human health, and the consumption of resources, 4) allows benchmarking of product system options and can therefore also be used in the decision-making of purchasing and technology investments, innovation systems, etc and 5) it is used in decision making as a tool to improve product design (the choice of materials, the selection of technologies, specific design criteria and when considering recycling).
The voucher scheme presents the opportunity to promote the LCA as an internationally standardized methodology that enables Slovenian SMEs to quantify the environmental pressures related to goods and services, the environmental benefits, the trade-offs, and areas for achieving improvements taking into account the full life-cycle of the product. The methodology reflects actual industrial process chains and provides valuable insights for businesses that can bring various benefits, and savings and lower the environmental impact.
Resources needed
Funded through EU Funding/National level
Period of eligible costs: from the publication of the public call and last until 30th September 2023
Minimum incentive: EUR 3,000.00
Maximum incentive: EUR 9,999.99
Maximum funding rate: 60%
Funds available for the period 2021-2023: EUR 409,000.00 until 2023
Evidence of success
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Voucher is a part of the larger voucher system that was set up by the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology and the Slovene Enterprise fund with the amendments to legislation. The vouchers were very well received by companies and at the same time achieved the role of raising awareness among companies about the importance of reducing the overall environmental burdens as well as improving the competitiveness of the company’s products.
Potential for learning or transfer
The main purpose of the voucher system is the allocation of incentives of smaller value, which provides micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with significantly simplified access to co-financing individual services through which companies can strengthen their competitiveness and competencies. The system includes 15 different vouchers among others LCA vouchers, Intellectual property protection voucher, Quality certificates voucher, Internationalization voucher, Circular economy voucher, Digitalization vouchers, Prototyping voucher, etc. This voucher system has a high transferability potential as they present the simple incentives of a smaller value for SMEs, the procedure process is fast and they are available throughout the whole year. The priority for transfer and the convincing factor is also the possibility to develop free assistance in preparing the application and claim to the SMEs through the national business support network that exists in EU states.