A new tool for driving life cycle assessment
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. As headlines remind us daily of the impact that manufacturing and using products have on the environment, the need to measure this impact is essential, if not critical. This is the reasoning behind life cycle assessment (LCA) and thinking. For a given product, process or service, it quantifies inputs and outputs, calculating their impact on the environment and various resources such as water, carbon, fossil fuels, land use, and other aspects. It is the basis of the scoring system of the Materials Sustainability Index (MSI), originally set up by Nike and then gifted to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) that integrated it as a module of the Higg Index in 2010. It is also the basis chosen for the European Union’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) project. The tool is used to evaluate all types of products and its influence is growing. But it is also in constant flux and, as a result, LCAs can become inoperative after only a few years if new processes are implemented or legislation and standards change.
