Highlighted product
Single-use PET bottle — cheap per unit, but every use is a brand-new bottle.
Pipeline stage
Number of uses (N)
Cumulative footprint at N
Disposable CO₂
–
Reusable CO₂
–
Disposable energy
–
Reusable energy
–
Disposable water
–
Reusable water
–
Break-even ≈ – uses — after this the reusable bottle has the smaller footprint.
How this LCA works

Each product's cradle-to-grave footprint is broken into 5 ISO 14040 stages: raw material, manufacturing, transport, use and end-of-life. The disposable bottle repeats stages 1–3 and 5 on every use (a new bottle each time); the reusable bottle pays a large one-off footprint at stages 1–3, a small footprint on every wash (use stage), and a one-off recycling cost at end-of-life.

  • Move the N slider to simulate using each bottle N times.
  • The chart line that stays below the other has the smaller footprint.
  • The crossover point is the environmental break-even — the reusable bottle only "wins" after enough reuses.