Comment to “Marginal and non-marginal approaches in characterization: how context and scale affect the selection of an adequate characterization factor. The AWARE model example”

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment -     

Launch of a new report: “Road testing organizational life cycle assessment around the world: applications,experiences and lessons learned”

Purpose

Organizational life cycle assessment (O-LCA) is still a rather young proposal, but moving towards becoming more broadly accepted as a scientifically mature and practical method. The UNEP/SETAC flagship project “LCA of organizations” concluded its “road-testing” phase and is glad to announce the publication of the final report “Road testing organizational life cycle assessment around the world: applications, experiences and lessons learned.” The full report can be accessed at http://www.lifecycleinitiative.org/download/6060. This article shortly summarizes the flagship project phases and main outcomes, particularly the report recently launched, and pinpoints future actions.

Methods

In 2015, the “Guidance on Organizational Life Cycle Assessment” was published. During the following 2 years, the flagship project accompanied 12 organizations in the road testing of that O-LCA Guidance. They represent four world regions, different sectors and sizes. The road testers’ case studies and their feedback are the basis of the Road-testing Report.

Results and discussion

The Road-testing Report aims to complement the O-LCA Guidance through the road testers’ experience, thus delivering advice for future practitioners and inspiration to method developers. It includes executive summaries of the O-LCA road testers’ case studies and the main results of a comprehensive survey through which the road testers share their experience, feedback, and lessons learned. The road testing confirmed the application potential of the O-LCA method and the positive outcomes of the road testing have shown that no immediate updates to the O-LCA Guidance are needed, but some priority actions were identified in order to further ease the application of O-LCA.

Conclusions

Three main tasks for the coming years are identified by the authors: firstly, the challenges highlighted during the road testing should be addressed in the future by the LCA community; specific methodological difficulties of certain kinds of organizations, like the service sector, should be targeted; and finally, the potential revealed by the organizational perspective can be deployed in adjacent LCA fields. The flagship project team hopes that this second publication, together with the great acceptance of the O-LCA Guidance and the contribution of third parties, will pave the way to make O-LCA a mainstream tool.

     

Challenges of organizational LCA: lessons learned from road testing the guidance on organizational life cycle assessment

Purpose

The novelty of the O-LCA method and the existing differences with the established product LCA practice, as well as the unique structure each organization, pose a broad range of methodological and application challenges, in addition to the general methodological gaps in LCA. In order to provide practitioners with lessons learned for future applications and boost future method development efforts, the paper discusses those challenges.

Methods

The challenges included in this paper were mainly identified from a survey administered to the road testers and from experiences during the piloting process. These are complemented with case studies from literature. The focus of the paper is on challenges exclusive to the organizational approach, although some additional issues common to product LCA but intensified in organizational LCA are also included. Each issue is characterized and exemplified, recommendations of reference standards are analyzed, and possible solutions discussed.

Results and discussion

With the goal and scope of O-LCA, some challenging issues were to select part of an organization as the reporting organization, and the operability of the reporting flow. Regarding the system boundary, the challenges were which parts of the supply chain should be included in the study, problems when setting the system boundary for the service sector, how to include supporting activities, and how to prepare the right system boundary diagrams. Regarding the inventory stage, the discussion starts with alternatives to the categorization of the inventory into activities and the aggregation of those activities into groups. It includes an equivalence table for an easier transfer from other organizational frameworks (ISO 14069 and the GHG Protocol). Some challenges during impact assessment and interpretation were the assessment of local impacts, scoping performance tracking, and the use of O-LCA results for an organization’s strategy.

Conclusions

The review of challenges is not meant as a complete overview of all possible challenges—new challenges may arise in future case studies. Further application testing is needed, along with research to support a future revision of the O-LCA Guidance, in line with the issues highlighted in this paper and new challenges may arise in future case studies. O-LCA has the potential to contribute in the future implementation of the life cycle concept in environmental management systems, in the development of organizational footprint metrics for region-specific impacts, and in the social dimension of life cycle assessment.

     

Organizational water footprint: a methodological guidance

The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment - This paper proposes a practical methodological approach to assess the water footprint at the organizational level, in line with the current...     

The implementation of organizational LCA to internally manage the environmental impacts of a broad product portfolio: an example for a cosmetics,fragrances, and toiletry provider

Purpose

This paper presents the implementation of O-LCA by a Brazilian cosmetics manufacturer. The case study was developed within the framework of the road testing of the “Guidance on organizational LCA” of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. The aim is to illustrate methodological choices and implementation challenges encountered by the company, i.e., related to the broad product portfolio. The study demonstrates that O-LCA allows quantifying and managing environmental impacts throughout global supply chains and for every individual product.

Methods

O-LCA provides the methodological framework for applying LCA to organizations, and a set of application options based on the structure and experience of organizations. The reporting organization is NATURA Brazil in 2013. The 2600 products in the portfolio are modeled in this first exercise of the company through the bestsellers at each of its ten product category groups. A hybrid approach is considered for data collection: top-down approach for modeling corporate activities and bottom-up approach for upstream and downstream life cycle phases. The data sources are NATURA’s recordings, data gathered from suppliers, estimates from mass and energy balances, and life cycle inventory databases. The approach to acquire direct data or use life cycle databases depends on the representativeness of each raw material or packaging.

Results and discussion

The results show that major impacts could be detected during use phase that demands water and energy to use rinse-off products (the use phase of NATURA’s products contributed over 41% to most impact categories), and in the supply chain, and generated during the obtaining of plant origin ingredients and materials for packaging. Overall, the whole NATURA had in 2013 a potential impact on climate change of 1.4 million tonnes of CO₂ eq, a natural land transformation of 1.3 million m², and a fossil depletion of 0.23 million tonnes of oil eq, among other impacts. Apart from the results at the organizational level, individual results for product bestsellers were calculated and are presented here.

Conclusions

The study confirmed the applicability of the O-LCA model at NATURA, addressed operational issues related to broad product portfolios, considering several dimensions such as data quality and availability, LCA software, and data management. Despite NATURA’s existing practices and previous knowledge in modeling environmental impacts of products and corporate activities, managing the large amount of data involved prove being a complex task. The company identified gaps and opportunities able to guide future method implementation and LCA-based management.

     

Direct GPU/FPGA communication Via PCI express

We describe a mechanism for connecting GPU and FPGA devices directly via the PCI Express bus, enabling the transfer of data between these heterogeneous computing units without the intermediate use of system memory. We evaluate the performance benefits of this approach over a range of transfer sizes, and demonstrate its utility in a computer vision application. We find that bypassing system memory yields improvements as high as 2.2× in data transfer speed, and 1.9× in application performance.     

Facts and figures from road testing the guidance on organizational life cycle assessment

Purpose

Organizational life cycle assessment (O-LCA) is an emerging method to analyze the inputs, outputs, and environmental impacts of an organization throughout its value chain. To facilitate the method’s application, the Guidance on Organizational Life Cycle Assessment was published within the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative and applied by 12 “road-testing” organizations. In this paper, different aspects of the road testers’ studies are displayed and analyzed according to the feedback of the road testers.

Methods

An anonymous survey about the method application was conducted among the road testers. The analysis assessed, among others: (i) which goals the organizations initially pursued and their achievement; (ii) how previous experience with environmental tools contributed to the study design; (iii) which methodological options were chosen (like the scope of the study, data collection approaches, impact assessment methods and tools, and data sources); and (iv) which methodological challenges were faced.

Results and discussion

The survey showed that analytical goals were of priority for most road testers and obtained a higher achievement level than managerial and societal goals for which either long-term measures or the inclusion of stakeholders are needed. Previous experience with product- or organization-related tools considering the whole life cycle proves useful due to available data and/or organizational models. The categorization of organizational activities, data collection, data quality assessment, and interpretation proved being the most challenging methodological elements. In addition, three cross-cutting issues of method application were identified: aligning the O-LCA study to previous environmental activities, designing the study, and availability of personnel and software resources.

Conclusions

The road-testing organizations verified the applicability and usefulness of the O-LCA Guidance and significantly widened the pool of case studies available. On the other hand, additional guidance for methodological challenges particular of the organizational level, the availability of software tools able to support O-LCA application, region-specific LCI databases, and a broadly recognized data quality assessment scheme would facilitate conducting O-LCA case studies.