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Wondering if Now’s the Time to Start that LCA for Your Star Product?
After a well-deserved summer vacation, we’re back! And this time, we’re here with a three-part analysis that dives into the business value of sustainability services and how they can fuel your company’s growth. Based on our experience, we’ll help you understand why sustainability is not just a responsibility—it’s a smart business decision. Let’s Start with the Business Value of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): 1. Holistic Perspective on Environmental Impacts: LCA provides a complete overview of the environmental impact of your products, from raw material extraction to final disposal. 2. Identification of Improvement Areas: It helps pinpoint stages in your product’s life cycle where environmental impact is highest and suggests areas where improvements can be made. 3. Cost Reduction & Resource Optimization: By optimizing production processes, LCA can reduce both resource consumption and overall costs. 4. Compliance with Environmental Standards: Ensure your company meets national and international environmental regulations and standards. 5. Enhanced Product Design: Integrating LCA into the design process helps create more sustainable products with environmental considerations in mind. 6. Stronger Supplier Relationships: LCA helps identify which suppliers align with your sustainability goals, strengthening partnerships for future collaboration. 7. Increased Sustainability Awareness: LCA serves as a catalyst for sustainability
ISO climate-related amendments from 2024
In February 2024, ISO issued a climate-related amendment to 31 existing management system standards.
This includes popular management systems such as ISO 14001 (environmental management system) and ISO 9001 (quality management system) and many others.
Potential benefits of the CSRD
As the first companies are releasing their sustainability statements ahead of the reporting season in 2025, the discussion about the potential benefits of the CSRD is alive and relevant.
Are construction materials in Sweden traceable?
Journalists Åfreds, Nilsson and Bennewitz showcase that it is often impossible to gather information pertaining to commonly used construction materials. This covers information on material origins and content, working conditions in the manufacturing process, socio-environmental impacts and so on.
EPD Standards
We describe EPD standards: ISO 14040, ISO 14044, ISO 14025, ISO 21930 and EN 15804+A2
Game over for ESG reporting in Excel?
With the increasing number of sustainability-related directives and (mandatory) frameworks to comply with, the field of reporting is gradually changing as well. Traditional sustainability reporting has largely consisted of Excel spreadsheets managed by a small number of employees at individual companies. Emission factors were often hard to obtain, reporting took a lot of manual effort, and data was largely static with few means of checking it for consistency. Due to a lack of harmonization in reporting requirements on an international level, the comparability of reports across companies was limited. Currently, with the emergence of highly complex reporting frameworks such as the CSRD, Excel seems to no longer be fit for ensuring compliance. This is primarily due to a lack of digital data tagging (a key requirement of the CSRD is to use the European Single Electronic Format – ESEF for presentation of reports), which is important considering the sheer volume of data to report on. Additionally, mandatory external auditing, dynamic data management, and global comparability of sustainability reports require systems that are more comprehensive and streamlined, and enable automation and sharing of data among many stakeholders. The notable growth of ESG software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies reflects the market needs for such
Will EPD become mandatory in the near future?
The European Construction Products Regulation (CPR) is being updated – in December 2023, a provisional agreement on the CPR revisions has been reached by the European Parliament and European Council.
Product Category Rules
The interest for Environmental Product Declarations continues to grow, however, it can happen that companies offer products for which EPD does not yet exist.
In this case, new Product Category Rules (PCR) need to be developed. 📗
PCR refer to a set of rules according to which EPDs are made. Each program operator is responsible for overseeing the development of PCRs and ensuring that they meet the requirements of the relevant standards and their own General Program Instructions.
Our expectations and what we look forward to in 2024
We are entering the new year rested and refreshed, how about you?
The start of 2024 marks an exciting year for sustainability legislation, both in the EU and globally, so let’s take a short look at some notable regulations. 🔮
Inclusion of multiple products into a single EPD
Several products can be covered by a single EPD!
The programme operator’s GPI (General Programme Instructions) and individual PCRs (Product Category Rules) outline in which situations multiple products can be grouped and published as a single Environmental Product Declaration.
EU Green Claims Directive
Are your products marketed as ‘eco-friendly,’ ‘natural,’ ‘recycled,’ ‘biodegradable’ and so on? 🐅♻️🗑️🌿
Can you substantiate these labels?
The 2020 European Commission study found that over 53 % of environmental claims in the EU are vague, misleading, or unfounded. Additionally, 40 % of these claims were found to be unsubstantiated. 🚨
CSRD Double Materiality
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (#CSRD) encompasses a wide range of disclosure requirements. As first reports will be due in 2025 for financial year 2024, let us have a look at a key concept underpinning the legislation! 🚦 📍#DoubleMateriality is a concept central to the CSRD and the introduced binding reporting standards, the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). It refers to the notion that the company activities affect the social and environmental matters, but these sustainability matters in turn also affect the company. Thus, the double materiality is split into impact materiality and financial materiality. #ImpactMateriality concerns activities which generate short or long-term, positive or negative, and active or potential impacts on the environment 🌱 and people. This is clearly connected to the Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) framework of classifying sustainability issues, as seen also in the CSRD with the proposed topical standards (the defined areas of sustainability). For example, calculating the environmental footprint of your organisation with respect to greenhouse gas emissions would fall under impact materiality. #FinancialMateriality focuses on the risks and opportunities created by sustainability issues. For example, if climate change is expected to result in diminishing stocks crucial to your supply chain, or if violations
Variability in EPD results across programme operators
💭 Recently, an interesting article on variation and comparability of environmental product declarations (#EPD) was published in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment by Konradsen et al., 2023. In the article, the authors analysed how methodological choices based on guidelines such as the General Programme Instructions and Product Category Rules (which are independently issued by the programme operators) can result in variable results for environmental impact categories considered. Taking a fictional example of a window 🪟, they performed an LCA based on PCRs of four different EPD programme operators – and the results they got differed, pointing to a lack of harmonisation in the EPD system. Since ultimately, the aim of the EPD system is to create a database of comparable products to inform decision making, for example when choosing suppliers for a construction project, doubts in the credibility and comparability of the EPD ecolabel can undermine the industry’s efforts to communicate sustainability efforts and compliance. What does that mean for us as LCA practitioners and EPD specialists? We have received similar questions from our clients before and something we feel very passionate about is helping them understand and interpret what hides behind complex methodologies used to create an
Introduction to CSRD
CS…SRD… CSR-what? You have probably heard of this acronym within the last two years, especially if you work in accounting, sustainability, or management positions. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) refers to the EU legislation which was first proposed in 2021 and entered into force in January 2023. It is no longer sufficient to assess the companies’ performance based solely on the financial information – environmental and social impacts are of great importance as well due to concerns for climate change and fair labour practices . The CSRD aims to strengthen the sustainability (social and environmental) reporting, which will increase the availability of sustainability data on par with financial information. Improvements in the transparency of companies’ sustainability performance are seen as greatly demanded by investors, consumers, and other stakeholders, and pursuing a common framework enables comparison. Furthermore, the CSRD is a regulatory driver for a transition to a sustainable economy, which encourages circular and low carbon business practices through the double materiality principle, which we will cover in our next post . Who does the CSRD apply to? The first CSRD reports will be required in 2025 (for financial year 2024) for large undertakings already subject to the Non-Financial Reporting
Seminar for Stockholm Material Hub
How replicable are LCA results and what affects their quality?