Companies are compelled to assess every element of a product’s life cycle for any number of reasons. But the benefits to a life cycle assessment (LCA) can be numerous, including helping reach organizational goals, identify new opportunities for product development, and surfacing important trade-offs for the company’s leadership.
“LCAs are the touch point, the connection between research and development and manufacturing goals, and how we get there,” Hannah Bakken, who is responsible for regulatory affairs and sustainability at 3M, said at the Environmental Leader & Energy Manager Conference in Denver.
She was joined for the track “Connecting Life Cycle Assessments to a Company’s Business Plan” by Debbie Kalish, program manager for the Center for Energy Efficiency & Sustainability at Ingersoll Rand and Angela Fisher, chief sustainability strategist at Aspire Sustainability.
For those who planning to do a life cycle assessment or just beginning one, the speakers had the following suggestions:
—Any department or division can take charge. “I’ll go to meetings with folks and they’ll say, ‘Where is within your company?’” Kalish said. “The answer is where is there leadership that is going to keep it alive?” Bakken agreed. “In 3M we actually have wide variety of places that it’s housed,” she said. “There is no right way to do it, if you’re doing it. There’s no ‘right’ place.”
—Find champions throughout the organization. Gathering all that data about products, suppliers, and manufacturing processes requires an interdisciplinary team. “You need a diverse group of people to help you collect it — facility managers, product designers, the sales force,” Fisher said, adding that communication is also important. “Don’t just have a consultant do an LCA for you and hand you a 100-page report. Nobody is going to read that,” Instead, you want the LCA result put into actionable and relatable next steps.
—Look for red flags. A good LCA provides a couple dozen midpoint indicators that will need to be translated and given context for decision makers at the company. But practitioners need to get in the weeds, Fisher said. “You want to make sure the folks who are doing the analysis are looking across all of those to make sure you’re not having unintended consequences, rebounds, trade-offs, those kinds of things.”
Kalish told Environmental Leader that doing LCAs gives Ingersoll Rand’s product teams the specific focus areas to direct new improvements. “They provide scientific, measurable numbers that resonate with the engineers.”
