How life cycle assessment can align your stars

Cut The Fluff Series 2

How life cycle assessment can align your starsBy Ramon Arratia

November 2011

www.interfaceflorcutthefluff.com

www.interfaceflor.eu/gobeyond

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How life cycle assessment can align your stars

The idea of life cycle assessment (LCA) has been around since the 1970s, but companies are only just beginning to tap into its real potential. At InterfaceFLOR, over the last few years we’ve realised the truly transformative effect of embracing LCA as a strategic tool. It’s helping us change the way we approach sustainability, providing a common language across the whole company and helping everyone work together to focus on solutions for the same key challenges.

We’ve found that LCA has the power to align the stars – to create a consistent approach to sustainability activity in every part of the business and to get everyone telling the same story. What your product designers focus on is the same as what your sales force talks about. What you say to your suppliers is the same as what you say to your customers. And what you report to stakeholders is the same as your marketing claims. The facts generated from the LCA form the basis for everything.

LCA is an established scientific method of assessing the environmental impacts of a product, including carbon footprint, resource use or toxicity. It studies all the impacts throughout the life of a product – from extraction and production of raw materials to manufacturing, transport, use, maintenance and end of life disposal.Evaluating these impacts enables informed decision-making about how to design, make and sell products.

The bigger pictureCrucially, LCA pushes a company to look beyond the direct impacts of its own operations. If a business makes a product, 60-90 per cent of its environmental impacts are likely to be outside the company’s immediate boundaries. Building a car, for instance, uses energy and raw materials. But according to the European Environment Agency, around 77 per cent of a car’s total footprint comes after it has left the factory – when it is driven around by consumers.


Many companies still don’t fully account for this kind of indirect impact, and instead focus 80 per cent of their efforts on managing 20 per cent of their impacts: the direct impacts. Most of today’s sustainability management concentrates on tools to manage operational impacts. Carbon management, for example, usually focuses on improving energy efficiency in the company’s operations, using renewables and reducing travel emissions. The emphasis is on corporate strategies and branding the company’s sustainability story; there is little if any mention of product impacts.

Many CEOs claim that sustainability is part of their company’s DNA. But it cannot be in the company’s DNA until the core thing in the company is radically re-designed: its products. An LCA helps you understand the true impact your products have on the environment. It tells the full story, revealing the impacts in every phase of a product’s life.

By producing LCAs for all InterfaceFLOR products, we have discovered that around 70 per cent of the overall environmental impact of our carpet tiles is related to the raw materials used to make them. Of these, the nylon yarn we use to make our carpet tiles has the single biggest environmental impact. In fact, nylon production accounts for almost half of the impacts across the full life cycle of a carpet tile.

LCA showed us that this is our biggest impact, enabling us to focus our efforts where they will make the biggest difference: reducing the amount of yarn we use, finding ways to recycle old yarn into new, and looking for bio-based alternatives to

The Cut The Fluff Series 2 Ramon Arratia November 2011

We’ve found that LCA has the power to align the stars – to create a consistent approach to sustainability activity in every part of the business and to get everyone telling the same story.

Reporting to government and stakeholders

What you tell your suppliers is the same as what you tell your customers.

What your designers focus on is the same as what your sales force talk about.

What you report to stakeholders is the same as what your marketing claims.

It’s all based on just the facts from LCA.

Supply Chain

Product Design and

Innovation

Marketing Sales

nylon. Today we have products with made out of 100% recycled nylon and half the amount of that yarn, cutting by half the overall impact. Before LCA we focused primarily on reducing the impact of our own operations, without realising we were missing the biggest impact of our business in the supply chain.

You too can use LCA to show what matters to your business, and your products. Start by conducting an LCA on your most important or popular product. Be prepared for the unexpected, and be ready to change your strategy as a result.

Aligning actionThe key to the LCA approach is that it provides a consistent focus for everyone involved in every part of the business – from product design and innovation to marketing, sales, procurement, and sustainability reporting. Here’s how it works:

Design and innovationThe first thing that happens when identifying the key impacts of your product is that you can redesign it to reduce those impacts. What gets measured becomes visible. This immediately gives your designers a clear objective to guide the design of your products, focusing on reducing key

impacts rather than ‘feel-good’ green gimmicks. Committing to performing an LCA for every new product before it is launched gives your designers strong signals about what the company wants from them. If a company didn’t have an LCA approach, design teams would start by coming up with a product that is ‘more sustainable’ without knowing what

‘more sustainable’ is. The brainstorming sessions come up with concepts like: ‘locally produced’, ‘natural’ ingredients or made using wind power. As a result, time and money can be channelled into product re-designs that sound bold and innovative, but make very little difference to the overall impact of the product. The results of an LCA give design teams the opportunity to say ‘OK, we now know that 80 per cent of the impact is in this area, so we need to work on reducing that impact’. It’s a no brainer.

LCA gives your designers a clear objective to guide the design of your products, focusing on reducing key impacts rather than creating ‘feel-good’ green gimmicks.


The Cut The Fluff Series 2 03Ramon Arratia November 2011

Supply chainThe second thing that happens is that your product managers tell your purchasing colleagues to translate the LCA findings to your supplier requirements. At InterfaceFLOR, once we knew that the biggest impact was from virgin nylon yarn, we asked our suppliers to come up with a way to give us 100 per cent recycled nylon yarn. One of them, Aquafil, invested in a re-polymerisation plant

to meet this demand and is now delivering 100 per cent recycled yarn made from old nylon fishing nets. LCA enables you to set clear expectations of suppliers where it matters, asking them to come up with radical, practical innovations that will help you significantly reduce product impacts. Supply chain management becomes less complicated too. Instead of sending suppliers 700-question questionnaires with requests such as ‘do youhave an environmental policy?’ or ‘have you signed up to the Global Compact?’, you can talk to them directly about how they can help you reduce the impact of your product. How transformative is a box ticking questionnaire compared with asking suppliers to respond just to your biggest environmental challenge?

MarketingOnce your suppliers have helped your innovation colleagues to produce more sustainable products, it enables your marketing department to make environmental claims based on fact, not greenwash. The marketeers now have a ready-made ‘angle’ for the product, as they are promoting something that ha s been designed to be sustainable. They no longer have to come up with a post-justification for the product’s sustainability. Like everyone else in your company, the marketing team can now focus on communicating the big impacts that really matter.

They have no need to come up with another label, the message is embedded in the product itself.

Sales

Your sales staff can now enter the same LCA facts into tenders and sales material. At InterfaceFLOR our sales people used to tell the story of Mission Zero – our promise to eliminate any negative impact on the environment by 2020 – when our customers were just asking about the impacts of

the carpet tile they were buying. Now they have something far more tangible to focus on. The LCA means they can tell customers exactly what the impact of a product is across its lifecycle and enables them to compare this with other products in our range. Printing this information on marketing materials means your sales guys have no scope for sexing up stories, because

the facts are right there in front of them and the customer. What is more re-assuring? If I tell you to trust me, that all my company’s products are good for the environment? Or if I tell you: this product has 5.7kgCO2 and this one has 12.9kgCO2. I am not going to patronise you, you have the hard facts – along with other factors such as design, price or service – you can use those facts to make a purchasing decision.

CustomersForget the consumers, my mum in the supermarket doesn’t care, she doesn’t have time to look at the facts. But there are other customers who do, especially these three types: governments who have committed to public procurement but don’t know how to make the decisions because product providers can’t give them the facts they need; B2B buyers such as architects designing green buildings; and retailers like Walmart driving carbon emissions reductions across its supply chain. The demand for plain facts as opposed to catchy labels or stretched claims can only increase. This is the interesting bit about stars aligning, when customers also align



Consumers don’t ask car companies for the sustainability report. They say: cut the fluff and tell me the gCO2/km.

Having the facts printed in promotional materials cut the greenwash, the funny labels and the self-serving claims. The marketing is done by the facts.

to LCA thinking then things happen. And if your company is tuned into that customer demand for transparency, then you have a huge competitive advantage.

Sustainability reporting Finally, the LCA approach simplifies environmental reporting. Until now, most companies have looked to stakeholders to guide them on which material issues to focus their activity and reporting on. This might work well for social and ethical issues, but why spend so much time creating materiality matrices and asking self-appointed stakeholders who have no way of assessing the real impacts of your business on the environment? An LCA tells you what those impacts are with no room for argument.

With an LCA, your company can cut the fluff and report performance on the impacts that matter most. No longer do you need a glossy corporate responsibility report that cherrypicks a few ‘green’ projects. Instead you can offer a robust report about how you are redesigning your products to cut impacts.

The way forwardMore companies are shifting their thinking from corporate to product sustainability. Slowly we are moving on from ‘The CSR decade’, which has been characterised by doing nice things and telling everybody about them. The new era, with LCA at its core, will be more about product sustainability, transparency and providing ‘just the facts’: embedding the story into products that speak for themselves. Corporate responsibility departments in many companies have ended up spending their time and effort on management processes that don’t focus on the biggest impacts. Using LCAs as the cornerstone of sustainability will allow companies to concentrate – and report - on the full environmental impacts of their business and their products, focusing as much, if not more, on impacts outside the company boundary.

For some service companies, the use of LCAs might not be so revelatory, as most of their environmental impacts are likely to be in-house. But LCAs will still show you where you need to concentrate your efforts, and they will still help to bring alignment across the company.



Following the rules for LCAOf course LCA is not foolproof. If you use unrealistic assumptions to underpin your assessments then you can come up with unrealistic figures. For instance, if you assume that your product has a lifespan of 20 years when really it will last only 10, then you will be halving the overall impact.

That’s why you need to do LCAs following product category rules that fix the assumptions so that competitors’ products can be compared. Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), based on LCAs, are produced in a standardized form recognised by the International Standards Organisation. InterfaceFLOR has committed to produce EPDs for all its products by the end of 2012.

With these rules in place, LCAs enable transparent comparability of product environment impacts and they can provide the missing link to join up disparate sustainability initiatives within your business. Not many companies have realised this yet. But the move towards product sustainability has started – led by companies such as Unilever, Tesco, and PepsiCo. Isn’t it time your company joined the movement?



About the author

Ramon Arratia is the Sustainability Director InterfaceFLOR EMEAI. His focus is on continuing to develop the company’s sustainability strategy towards Mission Zero as well as reviewing products, services and business processes to ensure that they are as sustainable as possible.

Ramon plays a leading role in InterfaceFLOR’s ‘Let’s be clear’ campaign, an anti-greenwash drive calling for full transparency in how companies declare the environmental impact of their products. He has also been instrumental in InterfaceFLOR commitment to have all products covered by Environment Product Declarations (EPDs) by 2012. Ramon is also leading InterfaceFLOR’s ‘war on waste’ campaign, an initiative which calls for action to change European Waste Legislation within the flooring and construction industry.

About InterfaceFLOR

InterfaceFLOR is the modular flooring division of US-based Interface Inc. The company is a worldwide leader in the design and production of high-quality, stylish, innovative modular floor coverings.

Interface was one of the first companies to publicly commit to sustainability, when it made a ‘Mission Zero’ pledge in the mid-nineties to eliminate its impact on the environment by 2020. Mission Zero influences every business, manufacturing and design decision made and inspires the company to continually go beyond current business models, practices and solutions in order to achieve its goal.

Interface is now more than half way to reaching its Mission Zero goal and has been widely recognised for its achievements to date.

How life cycle assessment can align your stars

Technology

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