LCA procedure evaluates a product’s

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Quantitative. Both mathematics and music have been called the universal language, as they are comprehensible regardless of one’s origin. Communicating product performance with quantitative metrics is an absolute must, enabling businesses to track their progress over time, compare across business units and across products, and even to perform sustainability analysis along with financial planning and bottom-line costs, revenues and profits.



Integrated. Product sustainability metrics must be integrated into day-to-day business decisions, otherwise they will forever remain isolated pet projects that are funded by research and development budgets. Firstly, they must be expressed in financial terms—the sole quantity CG Leads that businesses care about. Secondly, integrated means that product sustainability will be measured continuously and can consequently provide feedback mechanisms for performance, enabling performance data to influence daily decisionmaking.



Empowering: Think Globally, Act Locally. While climate science, life cycle analysis, and spatial geographic information systems are particularly good at giving a holistic, bird’s-eye view of the impacts of industrial production; they aren’t very good at empowering change at the local level. Product designers, financial planners, machinery engineers, and salespeople all need to be able to use integrated, quantitative metrics to evaluate local scenarios and see what makes sense for their business, in ways that they can actually change.



This means being able to compare product metrics such as energy use, water use, and carbon footprint across every product simultaneously. This enables a business to identify hot spots in order to achieve reduction goals, check the performance of their highest volume products, and determine which products are ready for marketing sustainability characteristics to customers.







Simple. There are in fact two very pragmatic reasons that simplicity is imperative to product sustainability analysis: ) to easily communicate and understand it, and ) to keep costs down. Simplifying analysis not only means that more people in companies that care about sustainability will understand it, but it also means less expertise is required to conduct the analysis. This simplicity keeps expensive consulting hours down, and consultants can instead add value by implementing strategies to reduce environmental impacts.



Standard. A reproducible product footprint method is paramount, such that independent companies can follow a trustworthy formula, and such that the results are comparable across products (both internally and externally). Consumers need the consistency of Nutritional Facts labels to be comparable, just as the Internal Revenue Service needs standard accounting procedures. Companies generally only care about knowing exactly what data they need to put in, where to get it, and what they will get out—in a standard, reproducible fashion.