Posts Tagged ‘Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)’

The LCA of renewables versus fossil fuel with CCS

May 13th, 2011
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Just the facts about how clean is the so-called clean coal.

Look below at the LCA values, produced by the IPCC, and judge by yourself…

Lifecycle assessments (LCA) for electricity generation indicate that GHG emissions from RE technologies are, in general, significantly lower than those associated with fossil fuel options, and in a range of conditions, less than fossil fuels employing CCS.

The median values for all RE are ranging from 4 to 46 g CO2 eq/kWh while those for fossil fuels range from 469 to 1001g CO2-eq/kWh (excluding land use change emissions)

Click the image to enlarge

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Our latest presentation on Transparency: a RIBA accredited CPD

January 27th, 2011
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We have produced a RIBA accredited CPD (Continous Proffesional Development) presentation, which can be done both on-line and face to face.

The CPD deals with the issue of transparency and EPDs. The content includes the following topics:

  • Questions environmental claims, labels in the built environment and challenges misconceptions.
  • Explains the importance of using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
  • Provides a check-list for assessing the environmental credentials of a supplier
  • Explains what an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is and its key benefits.

The online CPD lasts just over 30 minutes. At the end of the presentation there is an assessment slide and answers 5 questions, which are randomly selected. If the answers are correct it automatically, we will send a certificate.

Introduction page: http://www.ribaonlinecpd.com/company/03781/home03781.asp

Direct to presentation: http://www.ribaonlinecpd.com/streaming/03781_facts/index.asp

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Sustainability Predictions for 2011

January 20th, 2011
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4

1.Energy efficiency

Companies, countries and society have already figured out that tackling the negawatts is usually the most profitable way of cutting carbon. 2011 will the year where inneficiencies will be tackled in an impressive variety of ways. From companies profiting from selling innovative solutions to consumers, other companies and governments to green deals from governments. Even in Russia where climate change is not a popular topic, energy efficiency is one of the biggest topics for the year.

2. Full transparency will show up the true impacts

After the previous decade, people have had enough of carbon geezing, the term I use to include things such as companies saying they are carbon neutral even if it’s not the point, the abuse of offsets standars, the thousands of magic labels, etc. Full transparency (publishing all the impacts of all the life cycle stages of all your products) will be the only way your customers will trust you.

3. Legislation: leading companies will say ‘bring it on’

Tired of minimum-common-denominator business-association-led type of lobbying and advocacy, leading companies will tell governments yes to smart legislation. Yes, to efficiency standards, to a reasonable carbon price floor and well crafted bans (eg our wish of a ban on carpet landfill). Governments are realizing of how tiring and useless are voluntary agreements if there is no stick or threat attached to it. But smart legislation wont mean going back to the old school green legislation using the environment as an excuse for taxation.

4. The come back of the environmental geek

Companies will start hiring more people with ability to do proper LCAs because they need to understand their impacts at product life cycle level. And they will hire less in green spin doctors because the LCA facts will speak by themselves

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InterfaceFLOR at BAU Munich

January 17th, 2011
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The BAU exhibition has started in Munich (17th – 22nd January), one of the world’s leading trade fairs in architecture, materials and systems.

We’ve got a cool stand with an almost impossible design (see picture).

At BAU, we are showing how design leadership is compatible with sustainability.  We are also campaigning for full product transparency, the idea of publishing all the environmental information of all the stages of the life cycle of a product, in a third-party validated Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).

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Nokia publishes an ultra-summarised environmental product declaration for their products

January 10th, 2011
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Full Product Transparency is here today, beyond the building sector.

Well, not fully in the sense of the whole EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) following a product category rule but certainly a transparency move that not many companies are following yet.

In the following website, you can download an eco-profile for all Nokia’s products and accessories.

For example for the popular high end N95, you get this.

Hopefully the rest of the electronic industry follows and agree product category rules and start publishing proper EPDs for all products.

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Consumer product big multinationals getting there. Next step should be full product transparency.

January 7th, 2011
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It’s such a nice surprise to see big consumer product multinationals embracing LCA as a day by day management tool.

Henkel uses a LCA approach and have created a system to rate their own products.

They call it Sustainability#Master. See their presentation here

Unilever has recently committed to halve their environmental impacts of the products measured in full life cycle. See their presentation here

I think the next step for both consumer product companies and retailers should be full product transparency.

They should agree on product category rules and then calculate the impacts according to these product category rules rather than their own systems.

That would allow for  comparability. Then, the next step should be publish Environmental Product Decelerations (EPDs) according to the agreed product category rules.

This is what has happened in the floor industry and our commitment to publish EPDs covering all our products. I believe that next big competition in sustainability will be re-designing products and services to dramatically reduce their impacts.

This will be fuelled by transparent, comparable EPDs.

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More than 60% of the impacts of a mobile phone are embedded in raw materials and components

January 5th, 2011
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My ex-colleague Mats Pelback-Scharp from Sony Ericsson presented their green strategy in the latest LCA conference in London.

Interestingly around 60% of the impact of a mobile phone is embodied already in the raw materials and components.

So the myth that phones were a very small part of the whole mobile phone network is gone because it only takes account 16% of the phone’s impact.

Another myth was true but is being managed. Phone chargers used to keep on consuming energy when plugged in the switch even if the phone is fully load or unplugged.

The no-load power at Sony Ericsson has decreased from 1.4 watts in 2000 to less than 0.2 today.

Well done to Sony Ericsson, it would be great to have the data from other manufacturers as well.

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SustainaAbility’s Rate the raters report

October 28th, 2010
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SustainAbility published its second release of its Rate the Raters report.

Great report as always. I think they raise very good points like the lack of transparency or how the heck Halliburton makes the DJSI

But I think we shouldn’t bother with rating. It’s useless anyway. We shouldn’t bother with comparing companies. Competition between companies trying to be seen more sustainable is so 2000s…

We should compare products. Or services. We should compare products or services that perform the same function, that satisfy the same human need.

Let me tell you why comparing companies is so pointless:

  1. People buy products (or services), don’t buy companies.
  2. Most of the impacts of the products LCA are beyond company boundaries. Why would I car for the carbon emissions of BMW the company when what really matters is the gCO2/km of each car?
  3. Products perform a function, they are comparable. Companies might be very different, in size, product portfolio, geography, etc. Impossible to compare.
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Redesign of products in the West is the key to cut carbon in developing countries

October 26th, 2010
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On Wednesday I heard Friedrich Hinterberger from SERI speak. He had 54 slides with lots of world sustainability figures but one that got my attention was the net importers and exporters of carbon.

It shows clearly how the West is importing carbon emissions from countries like China. Most of these emissions relate to the embodied impact of raw materials that go into products. For example, around 70% of the LCA impact of a carpet tile is in the raw materials. This is more or less similar in most physical products.

So what is the best way cut carbon emissions in China then? No, it’s not transferring renewable technology there. It’s redesigning the products that we design in the West so that they have much less embodied carbon (for example by using raw materials less carbon intensive).

And is this difficult or costly? No, it’s not. The actual bottleneck is that people don’t bother to do the maths and use LCA.

Download the full deck from Friedrich here

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New Ecoindex launch from Outdoor Industry

September 6th, 2010
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In a great new approach from the outdoor industry, they have created an ecoindex based on LCA (Life Cycle Analysis), in which they assess products according to their different life cycle stages. http://www.ecoindexbeta.org

 Why do I like it?

  • It’s LCA based
  • It takes into account several impacts (not only carbon)
  • It’s being developed on the basis of transparency as open-source

What would be great in the future?

  • To develop a Product Category Rule (PCR) for the sector
  • Different manufacturers to publish the EPDs of their products
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Carbon reporting down to the second: gimmick or transparency?

August 9th, 2010
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defraEarlier this week, the UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra to you and me) joined the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Home Office in publishing real-time energy consumption data online. If you go to this page on their web site   you can see a graph spiking up and down showing energy units used per hour and use over the past 24 hours at its main London headquarters building. It is also clever enough to disclose the energy cost per hour and carbon emissions.

Whether this is simply a gimmick or real progress towards full transparency – I think it is certainly a good start. The government has committed to cutting carbon emissions across all central departments by 10% by next May, so it will be interesting to what Defra does next (and which departments follow suit). It has already promised that as more data is collected, it will publish results for different time periods (use per week, month and year).

So, Defra is definitely making a move in the right direction, but it needs to look at more than just energy consumption. Real carbon transparency will depend on reporting total carbon emissions during the whole life cycle of a building – including the energy used to produce building materials and furniture (and carpet!). Also, it’s not just carbon emissions that have a negative impact on the environment. Hopefully, one day in the not too distant future, government departments will also report on waste production and water usage in a similar way.

In my opinion, the best way for the Government (or any organisation for that matter) to get reliable and validated information on its full environmental impact, including carbon emissions is to use Environmental Product Declarations  and continue to provide just the facts.

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What are the categories in Life Cycle Assesments (LCA)?

July 5th, 2010
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These are some of the categories to measure environmental impact in an LCA (Life Cycle Assesment) and the units of measurement used.

  1.  Embodied energy  (not renewable Energy from fossil fuels): MJ
  2. Embodied energy (renewable Energy from renewable sources): MJ
  3. Greenhouse potential (emissions that contribute to climate change): kg CO2 equivalent
  4. Acidification potential (emissions that damage vegetation, buildings, aquatic life, and human health): kg SO2 equivalent
  5. Ozone depletion potential (emissions that cause thinning of the earth’s stratospheric ozone layer adversely affecting human health, natural resources and the environment): kg R11 equivalent
  6. Eutrophication potential (emissions that increase the nutrients in water or soil affecting the natural biological balance): kg phosphate equivalent
  7. Photochemical ozone creation potential (emissions of chemicals that cause smog, adversely affecting human health, ecosystems and crops): kg ethene potential
  8. Human toxicity potential (emissions of materials toxic to humans,animals or plants) kg DCB equivalent

More information about LCA and product environmental performance

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Environmental declaration of a carpet tile

July 2nd, 2010
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So how does an EPD look and what does it contain?  It fully discloses all of the ingredients and raw materials. There is no way to hide chemicals or components. It also discloses where the raw materials come from, and of course the full environmental impacts across various categories including all life cycle stages. See an EPD

Environmental Product Declaration

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Let’s be Clear

July 1st, 2010
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We have just launched our Let’s be clear campaign. It’s a call for transparency on environmental claims. It includes our commitment to full product transparency and having an EPD for all our products in Europe before 2012. Check out the website for more info.

Lets Be Clear

Let's be Clear

 www.interfaceflor.eu/letsbeclear

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So what does the EU’s International LCA guide say about carbon footprinting?

June 24th, 2010
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Carbon footprint and other studies with limited impact coverage
A prominent example of impact-coverage related limitations is the case of Carbon footprint calculations where exclusively climate change related greenhouse gas emissions are considered. Such an initial limitation can be fully justified, if the overall environmental impacts of the analysed product (and its competing products) are by far dominated by climate change impacts or if all other individually relevant impacts such as Eutrophication and Acidification are very closely and positively correlated with Climate change. Otherwise such limitations in the initial settings can result in inadequacy for comparisons (e.g. if two compared products clearly differ in their environmental impacts in other impact categories).

(extracted from The ILCD Handbook)

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The European Commission has published detailed guidance for Life Cycle Assessment

June 23rd, 2010
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The Sustainable Consumption and Production Action Plan (SCP) confirmed that “(…) consistent and reliable data and methods are required to asses the overall environmental performance of products (…)”

Download the ILCD Handbook

ILCD Handbook

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The link between an LCA and an EPD: Product Category Rules

June 14th, 2010
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LCA should ideally be conducted by an independent third party because there is too much scope for manufacturers to favour their own products. LCA involves a number of assumptions, such as the scope, the actual functional unit to compare, or the useful life of a product, that influence the results if not approached objectively.

To be comparable LCAs need to be conducted using a common methodology. That’s what Product Category Rules (PCRs) are for. There are several efforts to produce European-wide PCRs on many product categories. IBU, the Institute for the Built Environment, has contributed to develop PCRs for many materials in the building industry.

http://bau-umwelt.de

Environdec is developing PCRs for many different product categories as well.

http://www.environdec.com

Please find below the PCR that we used at InterfaceFLOR for producing our European EPDs.

InterfaceFLOR PCR

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Understanding product environmental impact. Why LCA is so important.

May 18th, 2010
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A typical manufactured product contains a number of components. Each component may contain several materials.

Most products are manufactured by a chain of suppliers, processing the material or assembling components prior to their final delivery to the customer. If you imagine the roots of a tree feeding towards the trunk, you have a visual impression of a typical manufacturing supply chain.

Environmental impacts occur at each stage of the supply chain from the extraction or growing of the raw material, throughout its processing and manufacture; transporting components between processing stages, and the finished product to the consumer or final user also has environmental impacts.

Many products have impacts in use and almost all do during disposal. To understand which product has the lowest environmental impact, you have to assess the impacts at each stage, from the beginning to end of the life-cycle.

Basing a judgement solely on one part of the life-cycle can be misleading.

The accepted method for life-cycle assessment (LCA) is defined by the International Standards Organisation (ISO14040 and ISO14044).

An LCA calculates the environmental footprint at each stage of manufacture, use and disposal. It assesses all the significant environmental impacts associated with the product, including the impact on water, air, land and climate change.

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