Assessing the sustainability of products

One way to assess product sustainability is to use a Life Cycle Analysis tool (LCA), but they can be expensive, time consuming and often limited in their application. Streamlined LCAs (SLCA) are a much quicker and cheaper approach to assessment that allow companies to identify 80% of the issues in a fraction of the time. 

The Natural Step (TNS) and Forum for the Future have developed an SLCA tool based on the TNS system conditions for sustainability set against the life cycle stages of a product. As a rapid but still rigorous alternative to LCAs, the SLCA is both an assessment and a communication tool. It identifies the major issues in relation to a product or process in a qualitative manner, allowing key aspects identified to be strategically explored in greater quantified detail as necessary.

Questions underpinning each life cycle stage are carefully directed to help product teams think innovatively about sustainability challenges. The answers result in a qualitative colour-coded matrix that communicates sustainability impacts to non-experts and benchmarks progress towards full sustainability.

The SLCA has been developed with a focus on ‘designing out’ unsustainable aspects throughout the whole life cycle. This is a more strategic and systematic approach than focusing on simply minimising the known negative impacts. It reduces the chance that creating a ‘solution’ in one part of the system transfers problems elsewhere or creates new ones.

• Quicker and cheaper than a full life cycle analysis (LCA)
• Reveals approximately 80% of the impacts over the complete life cycle of any product within an afternoon’s workshop.
• Causes product teams to think systemically about a product and provides a way to judge whether or not an innovation is truly more sustainable or not.
• Communicates sustainability impacts to non-experts.
• Benchmarks progress towards full sustainability.

 The SLCA in practice  The SLCA has been used to develop strategies to improve the sustainability of paint for ICI, and won the ICI Chief Executive's Leadership Award for Sustainability for Product Stewardship. The SLCA tool defined specific projects to reduce the emissions (solid, liquid and gaseous) profile of paint across its complete life cycle. It has also become a filter that will be built into ICI Paints innovation stage-gate process.

"To underpin our drive for sustainable development we are using the SLCA to help us understand the issues we face in moving towards more sustainable products."

Dr Phil Taylor, Paints Research Associate.

The SLCA matrix has also been used as a structured framework to identify sustainability issues for key ingredients with the food team at Prêt A Manger. The process aimed to show areas of concern across the lifecycle and identify knowledge gaps.

“We found using the SLCA tool invaluable. It was an easy to use and informative method by which to determine the sustainability pitfalls along the food supply chain. It has helped clarify provenance issues, as well as making the decision making much more informed - a great tool.” Nicki Fisher, Sustainability Manager, Prêt A Manger

Download more information about the SLCA.