PE Americas recently announced that it has joined The Sustainability Consortium, an independent group of research scientists and engineers dedicated to examining the issues and challenges surrounding sustainable product design and development. Spearheaded by retail giant Walmart in July 2009, one of the early charters identified for the consortium was to define standards and metrics for measuring and reporting on sustainability at the product level – in particular, for manufacturers and suppliers serving the retail market.
“One of the reasons we exist is because existing efforts to measure and report product sustainability have been fragmented and partial, in terms of their scope, the impacts of concern, or the life cycle stage being addressed,” says Dr. Kevin J. Dooley, Co-Director of the Sustainability Consortium. “Our approach seeks to capture all environmental and social impacts across the whole life cycle of a product,” he explains.
The real challenge is that the terms sustainable, environmentally-friendly, eco-friendly and green are often used interchangeably, resulting in a great deal of confusion in the marketplace as to precisely what sustainability means – both for manufacturers and for the consumer community. Ultimately, if the consortium is successful in its mission, it stands to have a significant impact on how consumer products are designed and developed if they are going to be labeled, ‘sustainable.’
One of the key questions? How such an organization might leverage existing commercial tools and methodologies to assist in this effort. With the addition of PE Americas, at least part of the answer is evident. As Dooley puts it, "PE Americas will help us build a scientifically rigorous system to measure and report the sustainability of consumer products in a standardized manner. Together we will spur a new generation of products and supply networks that address environmental, social, and economic imperatives."
More specifically, the organization states that, “To quantify product impacts, the Sustainability Consortium will be using PE International's GaBi LCA program, a powerful, fully‐featured software platform that supports the collection, organization, analysis, and monitoring of the environmental performance of products and processes.”
What this means with respect to the use of other commercially available LCA tools or methodologies is unclear, since the Sustainability Consortium specifically states that it ‘advocates for a scientifically grounded process and transparent system, not for individuals or organizations.’ But it certainly serves as a tribute to both the sustainability consulting expertise of the PE Americas organization, and to the capabilities of PE International’s GaBi product lifecycle assessment tool for measuring product impacts.
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