Life cycle analysis, or LCA for short, is a term that has been used more and more over the past year to describe the cradle-to-grave environmental impacts of a product. The LCA is a way of looking at the environmental demands of a product looking at the resource usage and releases to the environment across all the stages involved in making and using a product, from raw material acquisition, through material manufacture, product manufacture, filling, packaging and distribution, and consumer use and disposal. The paper describes what an LCA is, how LCA is being used, how LCA can be used in environmental assessment, how EPA uses LCA, and future direction of LCA's.