LCA: The Business Case (and Beyond)
A Pathway to Help Companies Reach New Frontiers Through Life Cycle Assessments
In their best-seller Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, authors Chip and Dan Heath suggest learning from the example of an elephant and its mahout. The elephant has the energy and the force to advance, but it is the mahout who provides direction. Without the latter, the former can wander without end.
In light of challenges like water scarcity, smog, or nutrient depletion from soils, more and more companies are convinced of the need to orient their business models to be part of the solution. Like the elephant, organizations are ready to embrace change and contribute toward a more balanced future. But they often lack a wise mahout, showing them where to aim.
This is where life cycle assessments have traditionally come in — even if they are now being taken to an entirely higher level.
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The Ins and Outs of Life Cycle Assessments
An increasingly popular tool, life cycle assessments (LCAs) are strategic methodologies that measure the overall impacts of products from their inception through the end of their life. As such, LCAs reveal where organizations should focus their attention in light of resource constraints, public expectations around climate change and ever-changing business environments.
Many Certified B Corporations such as Prana Biovegan and Seventh Generation are using LCAs to turn around their business practices to embrace broad, long-term management models responsive to all activities in their supply chain. Companies like these deploy LCAs to orient their energies in the right strategic direction, obtaining a holistic overview of all the factors related to a company’s ecological footprint — which, sooner or later, have a bearing on its ongoing financial and social success.
However, teams often lack further insight on how to deploy LCAs to turn shared challenges into opportunities for collaboration, let alone for the actual healing and restoration of human communities and ecosystems.
Check out the full LCA: The Business Case (and Beyond) prepared in collaboration with Ellio Consulting, a Montreal-based B Corp.
Pathways Toward Sustainable Frontiers
For this reason, I’m glad to share a viable pathway that is enabling B Corps and other forward-looking companies to use the transformational potential of LCAs as a force for good. Blending the expertise of B Corp Ellio Consulting with transformational sustainability principles, this pathway will enable your organization to take further steps along an innovative journey into the 21st century.
Specifically, the document enables you to do three things:
1. Learn key reasons to embrace LCAs.
LCAs are especially relevant nowadays when it’s commonplace to make “green” claims—some of which are valid but most of which are not. In fact, many experts believe that corporate social responsibility, as it has been practiced, is now on its way out after 20 years of mostly delivering incremental programs that are yet to bring substantive change.
In order to respond to the challenges ahead, sustainability needs to be taken to an entirely higher level — and LCAs provide the path to get there. When deployed in their basic potential, life cycle assessments permit organizations to:
- Obtain higher (and genuine) levels of confidence from stakeholders;
- Tap into alternative markets;
- Increase brand value and goodwill;
- Go a step ahead, while overcoming today’s greenwashing fatigue.
Besides these well-known reasons, some companies are taking LCAs further, which leads to the next two points.
2. Use LCAs to obtain a holistic, transformative analysis.
Holistic approaches grounded in LCAs have borne a substantially different approach to doing business, often called CSR 2.0. In this case, companies and organizations take a bold leap marked by the reconfiguration and healing of entire systems of social and ecological relationships that sustain them. The UN Environmental Program identifies this sort of transformational approach as one that goes beyond sales and incrementalism by focusing on general well-being and systemic change — i.e. business as (highly) unusual.
Examples of such holistic transformation are popping up around the globe. Mexico’s Bio-Pappel is determined to make an urban forest out of city paper dumpsters. Hundreds of manufacturers are collaborating in the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, creating an index to share, measure and elevate production standards across the international apparel industry. Brazil’s Natura founded the Union for Ethical Biotrade to promote worldwide biodiversity-based sourcing.
A noteworthy case in point, as well, is Canada’s largest credit union, Vancity, which not only maintains a commitment to carbon-neutrality and in recent years extended its living-wage policies beyond employers to contractors. Even prior to becoming a member of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, the credit union’s “Shared Success” program distributed 30 percent of its profits with members and local organizations that can have the most impact in creating healthy communities. These include non-for-profits, cooperatives and some social enterprises that work to advance social justice, environmental sustainability, and financial inclusion — particularly for low-income and marginalized populations.
However, together with strategic grants, patient capital and partnership building, the credit union goes beyond that by targeting 44 percent of new business lending to “community impact” — such as financing affordable housing, green buildings, First Nations projects, and social enterprises. This shift to impact financing helps Vancity create broader impact that advances sustainability and shared well-being.
Organizations like these are evidence of how directive approaches can use LCAs to identify crucial pathways toward inspiring, transformational horizons. (The next step, of course, is for other players in their industry to follow suit and collectively turn around their respective sectors, for good. Following Vancity’s lead, think, for example, if all banks and credit unions decidedly withdrew their funding for oil and gas to only finance initiatives that enable the transition toward a low-carbon, steady-state, inclusive economy. That’s where the real transformation now needs to take place.)
3. Reach new horizons with LCA-inspired “compactivism.”
Following steps like these, the last decade has seen the emergence of inspiring B Corps, social enterprises, and transformational companies that are reorienting their operational and communication strategies to create broader awareness, address collective challenges and facilitate tangible avenues for systemic change. Under the new LCA paradigm, marketing has ceased to revolve around sales. Instead, all efforts are integrated and focused toward turning companies into active agents in an upward marathon of “CompActivist” systems change.
Enter the well-known protagonists. Interface has been collecting plastics from the oceans through socially inclusive business enterprises to turn nylon fishing nets into recyclable carpets, even as they have set up an entire product collection infrastructure for closed-loop “servicing.” Following their LCA-based Footprint Chronicles, Patagonia is sharing with the textile industry 20 years worth of best practices aiming, among others, to take small-farm organic cotton mainstream. The Body Shop’s commitment to “enrich, not exploit” promotes biodegradability and community fair trade agriculture, while seeking to engage over 8 million people in a lobbying campaign for a global ban on animal testing.
Such trailblazing companies are determined to use business as a force for the common good, fostering a sense of pride in their customers and stakeholders in doing so.
True, there remains the crucial dilemma of endless growth on a finite planet. And it’s also true that business will not be the only (nor the fittest) player to address it. But beyond seeking their own well-being, organizations like these are at least proactive about inspiring and enabling their stakeholders to safeguard and improve the wider contexts in which they operate.
If anything, such is the kind of growth we need; one that is birthed out of our current system in order to create long-term, stable conditions of inclusive well-being within the bounds of our planet.
Like a mahout, LCAs will serve as key helpers for mapping the way ahead. “CompActivist” companies guided by LCAs are proving to be in a better place to operate holistically with a multilateral awareness of their contexts and their impacts. Such awareness equips them to face upcoming risks and allows them to respond creatively, and honorably, to the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Perhaps like never before, the time cannot be riper to be attentive to the real needs of our finite planet, in the name of contentment, well-being, and beyond.
To learn and discover more, download LCA: The Business Case (and Beyond) and begin to make the best of LCAs.
Eduardo Sasso is an entrepreneur, business sustainability consultant, and the author of A Climate of Desire
B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
