IGPN - International Green Purchasing Network

November 10, 2014

Product Sustainability Jumps to the Next Level

Lifecycle analysis (LCA) has become a best practice tool that many companies use to analyze and improve the environmental performance of their products. It enables them to work out what the biggest impacts of a product are and where they occur in the process of creating and consuming it. A company can then focus on reducing those impacts and measure progress towards its goal.

But sustainability metrics are evolving. A recent poll of more than 100 environmental managers, product designers and LCA practitioners conducted by Trucost reveals the limitations of LCA. Measuring impacts in physical terms such as tonnes of greenhouse gases or cubic meters of water used is becoming a first step towards creating more insightful and user-friendly metrics. Converting physical data to monetary values using natural capital valuation takes LCA to a whole new level. The implications for product design were discussed at a recent Trucost webinar.

Natural capital refers to the goods and services provided by nature, such as forests which give us timber and which also clean the air and regulate water flows. In the past, business and society has taken these resources for granted ? and to a great extent still does. But increasingly, companies are having to pay for these costs as a result of environmental regulation. Applying natural capital valuation to products can help companies design lower impact, more sustainable products and avoid these costs.

The poll showed that one limitation with LCA is that the results are very technical, and only really understandable by LCA specialists and experts in the sustainability team. Just 13% of respondents said that the results make sense to a mainstream business audience (see figure 1). Converting LCA data into monetary values overcomes this issue by presenting the data in a way that is accessible to everyone.

Read more at Environmental Leader.

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