Session
TU.1.E || Digital Technologies for a Circular Economy
Authors
Schiffleitner, Andreas; Prox, Martina; Wahl, Anne
Abstract
Interest in carbon footprints of products has grown considerably by industry in the past few years. Pure efficiency measures are no longer sufficient for large companies to mitigate climate change risks and achieve their sustainability goals. A deeper insight into the interrelationships of the entire product life cycle of the overall portfolio is required. Access to life cycle information must be created for all departments of a company because significant ecological impacts can often only be avoided by decisions made in the early product development phase. This requires LCA software providers to provide features for faster calculation of companies’ product portfolios. iPoint is leading the way inspired by customer demands from companies like Logitech. Their incentive is to change the electronics industry from the inside out, and to set a high-quality level in terms of sustainability. Logitech is committed to product carbon transparency and has started calculating and publishing carbon footprints of gaming products on every package using iPoint’s Service and Solutions. The audience will understand illustrated by the case examples like Logitech how Life Cycle information becomes widely integrated in decision-making, supporting carbon reduction goals and overall product sustainability innovations. iPoint implements such capabilities using generic models into which Bills of Materials of different products can be loaded, calculated and auto-verified results are generated for each product. In order to enable auto-verified results generic models undergo an independent third-party certification. Speed and scalability is also reached by automatically assigning entries of Bills of Materials to appropriate generic data sets from, for example, the ecoinvent database using machine learning.