Session
WE.2.E || Mobilizing LCA Resources Through Digital Collaboration
Authors
Otte, Nikolaj; Tolls, Johannes; Christine, Schneider; Klemmer, Anna; Kremer, Joachim
Abstract
Corporations are held increasingly responsible for their environmental impacts (e.g. through the Science Based Target initiative) and their customers request an increased transparency. LCA is becoming a standard assessment technique and may be a requirement in future policies, e.g. the ‘product environmental footprint‘ in the European Union. LCAs provide information that can be used to steer the development of products towards an increased resource efficiency because the LCAs help identifying and focusing on the actual levers for a reduction of the footprint. A wholistic assessment of product life cycles is achieved at cradle-to-grave scope. The relevant life-cycle stages for Henkel products have been defined in the Henkel ‘Sustainability#Master’. They include ‘Raw Materials’, ‘Production’, ‘Logistics’, ‘Industrial Processing’, ‘Service / Use’ and `Disposal`. Collecting specific information for each step along the entire value chain and performing one-by-one product assessments is time consuming and inefficient for large enterprises. By establishing centralized data sources and a collaborative toolchain we can maximize the use of available data and decentralize the assessment of products. This has multiple benefits such as: a) creating end-to-end transparency in company product lifecycle management (PLM) processes b) Enabling non-sustainability experts to gather meaningful insights and to use this information in their daily work c) ensure consistency in the assessments and d) relieve of bottlenecks that are imposed by standard LCA workflows.