Summer - InsideOutdoor Magazine

Back Office
Life Cycle Assessment Meets Web 2.0
by Greg Norris
IT IS HARD TO BE AWAKE THESE DAYS and not feel the
change. People, lots more people, are taking a whole new
look at their relationship with the planet. There are explosive
new levels of concern about climate change and a rising
sense that all of us need to play a role in addressing it. Mainstream
Americans are starting to think and ask and care about
our own “climate footprint,” about our impacts. We are taking
it personally.
Of course, when consumers and employees take our footprint
impacts seriously, our employers and would-be vendors find
they must do the same. This too is happening. These changes are
accelerating, and it appears possible that they will coalesce into
something planet-transforming — as they need to.
THE STORIES BEHIND PRODUCTS
This morning you probably showered and ate breakfast, and
perhaps traveled to work, probably in a car. Even if you telecommute,
look around your home office at the goods, powered by
electricity, and at the furniture on which they all sit, as well as
where you sit.
Think about the supply chains for those products — the
factories in Asia which produced your computer and printer,
the power plants in your region that generate your electricity,
the paper mills in North America that made your printer’s
paper, the factories that produced the trucks that shipped your
office supplies, and even the growers in South America who
grew your coffee.
Mainstream attention to climate change is helping mainstream
folks think increasingly in terms of “footprints” and
“embodied environmental burdens.” We are realizing that everything
we buy has a story behind it.
This thinking helps us realize that the influence of those
purchases extends way beyond the final producers of goods
and services. Many of the most important social and environmental
impacts occur farther up the supply chain, often
in countries beyond our borders. For some products, major
impacts occur during the usage phase and/or disposal phase
of the life cycle as well.
In the late 1960s, folks in the United States and Europe
began asking themselves about such stories behind the life
cycles of beverage containers. They noticed a shift underway,
from returnable bottles to “one-way” (disposable) packaging,
and wondered what the shift might mean for issues like energy
use, solid waste and pollution.
In an attempt to provide quantitative comparisons of the environmental
“stories” of different packaging alternatives, the
method of “Life Cycle Assessment” was born.
LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is now an ISO standardized
approach for quantitatively summarizing environmental impacts
over product supply chains and life cycles. The range of
environmental concerns addressed by LCA is designed to be
comprehensive, including impacts on human health, ecosystems,
climate, and resources.
LCA addresses impacts attributable to emissions to air,
water and soil, as well as extractive flows from the environment.
More recently, LCA is being expanded to address social
issues in supply chains and life cycles as well.
Today’s LCAs are done primarily by and for large organizations.
This is because LCA requires extensive databases and
the use of specialized modeling software. The databases are
comprehensive, containing data on thousands of interconnected
unit processes, with each process using specified
quantities of inputs from nature and other unit processes, and
most also emitting specified quantities of many different pollutants
to air, water, and land.
These comprehensive databases require millions of dollars
and many years to create, and they must then be kept current.
The Swiss government, for example, has invested the required
resources during the past 30 years to achieve today’s “EcoInvent”
database (www.ecoinvent.ch). In addition, U.S. agencies
have partnered with private industry to launch the U.S. LCI database
(www.nrel.gov/lci), although after five years the database
contains a few hundred processes.
The standard approach to LCA database development has
followed the standard model of Web database creation, namely
a centralized, provider-driven effort. The creator of an LCA database
sends detailed questionnaires to a representative sample
of companies that produce a particular product of interest. This
research institute or consulting firm gathers and aggregates the
data from the different companies, performs important quality
assurance and error checking, and generates data on the average
production of the product.
Web 2.0, the paradigm of “bottom-up,” user-driven content
development, illustrates a whole different approach to
LCA data development and use. As in other areas of information
creation and sharing, the shift from provider-driven data
to user-created data has the potential to create vastly richer
data resources while also democratizing access to, and use
of, the information.
The data sources for LCA can be richer in at least two key
ways. First, they can cover a much wider fraction of the goods
and services sold in the economy, and second, they can be
brand specific.
70 | InsideOutdoor | Summer 2007