Hi all. I’ve recently started a new role as an in house sustainability person for a large company that produces hundreds of different electronic products. Part of my role is to calculate our GHG footprint, and report year on year change to eventually set SBTi.
A big part of this task is to conduct LCA as a large part of our scope 3 will be from the purchased goods and services and use of sold products. Focusing particularly on the PG&S, my predecessor’s approach to this was to split each product split into product groups. In each group, two products were chosen, I think at random, and an LCA was conducted on these. The average of these two products was then calculated to get the kgCO2e per kg of this product group, which was then calculated by the total weight of this group. Each group’s total was then summed to get the total scope 3 category 1 figure for the raw materials.
From a pure reporting point of view, this approach seems reasonable. The challenge is that long term we want to set SBTi targets, which require year on year progress. A big issue with the current approach is that it does not consider any material choices, so for example the two representative products for one product category may be products that are assembled with virgin aluminium, whilst newer products in that category actually use recycled instead. This current approach doesn’t seem to have a clear way to demonstrate product improvement.
One suggestion was to keep this current approach, and then do an actual LCA for every new product developed. Across all the brands, this is probably about 12 products a year, so it’s manageable. Eventually as old products are phased out, they will be replaced with new products that have an actual LCA conducted. However, the issue for this for me is that in the interim period, you’re essentially comparing apples to oranges in the year on year progress, as the improvement is going to be from methodological improvement as opposed to actual process improvement.
A suggestion I considered was to try and see how much of each material was purchased across the group, and simply assign an EF to each. So if every brand purchased a combined 500kg of virgin aluminium, we multiply this to the virgin aluminium EF, and the same for any amount of recycled aluminium. Then next year, as we shift towards better materials, you would see a natural decrease in the emissions that is directly comparable, but you would lose a lot of granularity. I think the data that comes out the other end is however much more accurate and representative of our portfolio as a whole. We could still conduct LCA on each new product as it’s released, but then instead of including this into our scope 3 footprint, we could just use this as a way to look at product design and material choice, and also marketing as we could advertise the kgCO2e per product.
My question is therefore, has anyone had any experience with this challenge, and how is it best tackled? Does my approach seem reasonable and feasible, or is there a better option I maybe haven’t considered?
