Operationalizing LCA within Industry

Special session coordinator: William Flanagan, GE

Industrial interest in LCA has increased substantially in recent years as a result of several factors including product-focused regulatory and standard-setting activities, retailer initiatives, consumer interest, green competition, increased corporate social responsibility, supply chain greenhouse gas reduction initiatives, and evolving green marketing guidelines. LCA provides the opportunity to address product life cycle issues across the value chain, ultimately leading to a more efficient utilization of the planet’s limited natural resources in order to meet the needs of society with the lowest environmental impact. This session focuses on the application of LCA within industry, and offers perspectives from companies that have been practicing LCA for many years as well as those that have only recently begun to implement life cycle perspectives.

Industrial applications of LCA vary, as each company has its own unique culture driven by business strategy, competitive landscape, organizational structure, and many other internal and external factors. The presentations in this session highlight a wide range of LCA applications that impact a company’s products and operations. Specific topics to be addressed include:

• Application of LCA in research and development
• Collaborative use of LCA with customers and suppliers
• LCA in the broader context of Design for Environment
• LCA as a tool to develop internal product development metrics
• Use of LCA methods to address life cycle greenhouse gas reduction initiatives
• Product LCA examples
• Streamlined LCA approaches
  

Presenters:

Product Environmental Metrics for Printer Development at HP
Jason Ord, HP
Tim Strecker, HP
presentation

Hewlett-Packard’s Imaging & Printing Group (IPG) is charting a course towards environmental leadership in its markets. To do this, IPG must look beyond just satisfying the regulations and identify opportunities for groundbreaking improvement. Carefully designed metrics are necessary to guide design, chart progress and set goals in this effort. IPG’s Environmental Strategy Team is leading an initiative to establish these metrics internally. This paper describes the development process the authors followed to construct the initial metrics, focused on the "carbon footprint" of products under development, as well as the lessons learned and results achieved thus far, implementation, challenges, and future opportunities for improvement.

Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to Develop a Corporate Sustainability Strategy
Gretchen Govoni, SABIC Innovative Plastics
presentation

As SABIC Innovative Plastics transitioned to new ownership, we were in a position of beginning to embrace LCA during the same time period that the sustainability program was being modified to fit the new business model. Therefore, we were able to apply lifecycle concepts into the development of the new sustainability strategy. Strategy development steps included evaluation of impacts from raw materials, from our own processes, and impacts downstream of our operations including the use and end of life phases. Five key strategic pillars were confirmed based on the lifecycle impacts: bio-based materials, recycle, cleaner chemistry, process efficiency and application design. Lifecycle assessment resources are currently dedicated to supporting technology development, product marketing, and manufacturing.

Challenges and Benefits of Integrating LCA into Research and Development: Butamax™ Biobutanol Case Study
Stephen Tieri, DuPont
Robin Jenkins, DuPont
Todd Krieger, DuPont
Robert Sylvester, DuPont
Carina Alles, DuPont
Susanne Veith, DuPont
Steve Barr, DuPont
presentation

DuPont's 2015 Sustainability Goals are the expression of a life-cycle-thinking business concept integrating all of our operations, from research and development to manufacturing to marketing. Successful new products provide superior functionality and favorable sustainability attributes to customers and stakeholders, such as reduced energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Choices made early in research and development programs often determine these product attributes. However, significant uncertainties in evolving technologies, data gaps, and changes in the business and regulatory environment are all challenges in the effort to integrate LCA into general business practice. To meet these challenges, DuPont LCA practitioners use LCAs to identify areas of concern and improvement opportunities in the early development stages.

BP and DuPont have recently formed Butamax™ Advanced Biofuels to commercialize Biobutanol. The Butamax™ business example illustrates how the integration of sustainability principles into research and development enables innovative and competitive future technology options with quantifiable environmental benefits in the marketplace. Specifically, our LCA has guided development of production pathways for Biobutanol that are superior to traditional biological production of butanol by acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) technology in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and fossil energy use.

The Use of LCAs from within Our Company's Gate to Our Customers and Market Segments
Gary Jakubcin, Owens Corning
presentation

Up until the last year or so, the focus of performing a product LCA has been for company use only. They were performed to better understand our product’s environmental and energy footprints. Sometimes the data was used for external reasons. With increased awareness by the marketplace and industry sectors, the demand for product LCA information has increased tremendously. Product LCAs have now been included as requirements and/or options in various “Green” building specifications for product approval for use. Product comparisons using LCAs are being requested by architects, designers and other product segment groups. Working jointly with our customers using LCAs has provided a new step in supplier-customer synergies. This presentation will cover Owens Corning’s perspective on the external explosion of LCA requests and our experience with using them with our customers.

Using LCA to Develop Climate-Neutral Products - A Practical Example
Connie Hensler, Interface
John Jewell, PE Americas
presentation

Interface and its partner PE Americas share a common concern for the environment with particular interest in mitigating climate change through the elimination of product-related emissions. With the help of PE, Interface addressed this concern by creating climate neutral products. The total GHG emissions created during the life cycle of Interface’s carpet products (raw material acquisition, manufacturing, transportation, use and maintenance, and end-of-life disposal) are modeled using Life Cycle Assessment via PE’s Gabi software. These emissions are then neutralized through the purchase and retirement of an equivalent number of verified emission reduction credits. As a result of this program, Cool CarpetTM, a majority of Interface’s global product offering is climate neutral.

Each of Interface’s worldwide business units offer a different range of carpet products and utilize different manufacturing and distribution networks. To keep the Cool Carpet program simple, a sales-weighted average product was modeled for each business unit. Dozens of LCAs were performed for 90% of the top-selling carpets using a parameterized Gabi model. Gabi’s global parameters easily switch Fiber type and weight, backing type, recycled content, and EOL disposition.

Once the GWP is determined the next step in the program is offsetting. Not all offsets are created equal and strict criteria to select carbon offsets for the Cool Carpet program are required. When reviewing offsets, they must be real, permanent, additional and verifiable carbon offsets certified to a consensus-based protocol. To identify credible carbon offsets, Interface uses a combination of verification requirements, standards and additional criteria. Some of these include the Voluntary Carbon Standard, the Gold Standard, CDM-VER, and VER+. The offsets are purchased and are permanently retired. Each Interface business unit (manufacturing location) absorbs the cost of offsetting their average product for every square yard of Cool Carpet sold.

Another advantage of modeling the carpet LCA with Gabi was highlighting differences among the Interface business units based on their GHG performance. The LCA broke life cycle impacts further into Fiber, Backing, other Materials, Transport, Process Energy, Use phase (cleaning), and Disposal. Interface businesses who use less energy and materials or sold more innovative environmental products (like carpets with high recycled content) spent less money on offsets than their counterparts around the company, creating healthy competition between the branches.

Because carbon offsetting can be controversial it is important that programs like this be third party verified. Interface’s Cool Carpet program is verified by SGS. This includes verification of the LCA methodology, the calculation of the required offsets, and the credibility and retirement of the offsets.

Life Cycle Assessment: Promoting Sustainable Development at Dow
Shawn Hunter, Dow Chemical
presentation

Life Cycle Assessment has been practiced at Dow Chemical for more than 20 years. Dow continues to be engaged in the development and promotion of LCA methodology and concepts. The announcement of Dow’s 2015 Sustainable Chemistry goal, which is based on life cycle thinking, led to a focused LCA effort and to the establishment of a formal LCA expertise group within Dow’s EH&S/Sustainability organization. This group is leveraged across all Dow businesses to provide LCA support for customer inquiries, collaborative projects, and business decision making. This presentation will review the goals, activities, and vision of the Dow LCA group. LCA tools, methods, and processes used by the group will be discussed. Highlights of recent LCA studies will also be presented, which demonstrate the value of the group in promoting and integrating sustainability at Dow.

Design for Environment at Rolls-Royce
Stafford Lloyd, Rolls-Royce
Andrew Clifton, Rolls-Royce
Lucia Elghali, University of Surrey
Jacquetta Lee, University of Surrey
presentation

This paper presents a case study of applying a novel approach to interpreting life cycle inventory information. Data has been taken from a simplified life cycle analysis of certain components of a low-bypass ratio turbofan engine manufactured by Rolls-Royce, and analysed to provide a measure of its environmental impact together with a financial measure of current and future business risks. The paper presents the results of the study and discusses issues in the application of the approach and how it needs to be developed.

The business risk indicator is derived from a survey of regulatory, legislative and market based influences arising from public policy developments in response to environmental concerns. Rolls-Royce’s products have relatively long life cycles so predicting how these influences are likely to change into the future is an important requirement. The critical aspect of the approach is that it provides an environmental cost indicator derived from (potential) operational costs, rather than attempting to calculate uncertain (and contentious) damage values.

This technique has been developed specifically for the needs of Rolls-Royce as part of a DfE (Design for Environment) system based on a streamlined life cycle analysis approach. The requirement for DfE has been defined from a situational analysis of the decision-making contexts within design processes, and from knowledge of the environmental profile of a typical Rolls-Royce product. From this requirement the system has been developed to focus (although not exclusively) on the areas of the product life cycle outside of the use phase, specifically issues from manufacture and end of life. The DfE system needs to highlight where environmental concerns pose a risk to the cost or produceability of a product so that environmental information can be compared with other design decision parameters generally measured in monetary terms. This necessitates the development of the business risk indicator providing a measure of current or potential environmental costs.