Page 54 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

36 M. Owsianiak et al.

1990s mainly used LCA internally, to identify hotspots in products and systems,
followed by product and process optimization (Bültmann 1997; Frankl and Rubik
2000). Another survey showed that large Danish companies, represented by 39
companies considered to cover 90–100% of Danish enterprises having practical
experience with LCA in the 1990s, indicated that LCA had revealed new envi-
ronmental aspects of their products that they had not anticipated. In 79% of the
cases, this led to setting new priorities for environmental efforts, including changes
in products and processes, like saving or substituting materials (Broberg and
Christensen 1999).
In parallel to application in product and process development, LCA is often used
for marketing purposes at different levels. As public concerns about the state of the
environment have become increasingly pronounced and consumers more environ-
mentally conscious, enterprises have also placed a larger focus on quantifying their
environmental performance, using LCA and communicating this to the public as a
way to brand their enterprise as green. Here, the major company expectations to the
use of LCA are to get a competitive advantage and increase the company image or
reputation (Broberg and Christensen 1999). Ecolabels or environmental product
declarations (Chap. 24) can signal good environmental performance and be used to
make a given product more appealing for environmentally conscious consumers.

4.3.2 Applications at Corporate Level

The use of LCA to document and monitor environmental performance at the cor-
porate level is today often limited to a few selected impact categories, typically
footprint indicators (see Sect. 10.4) like carbon footprint and blue water footprint.
This situation may change in the future together with the development of guidelines
for organization environmental footprint (OEF) (Dubois and Humbert 2015). At the
corporate level, industry can also use LCA for setting strategic objectives. For
example, Unilever set a target of halving their environmental impact by 2030,
considering the life cycle of their products (Unilever 2015). Similarly, companies
may want to carry out LCA to better understand their environmental performance in
an effort to implement environmental management system (EMS) (Lewandowska
et al. 2013, 2014). EMS is “a tool to implement a structured program of continual
improvement in environmental performance” and “a tool to manage and commu-
nicate an enterprise’s environmental performance to internal and outside parties”
(Lombardo 2012). EMS standards nowadays often require a life cycle perspective
in order to avoid greenwashing by companies outsourcing parts of their production
to suppliers. There is thus often a relationship between the implementation of EMS
and the implementation of LCA within companies. For example, among Spanish
automotive supplier companies who have received the EMS ISO 14001 certification
and have a certified eco-management and audit scheme (EMAS), the use of LCA is
a common practice (Gonzalez et al. 2008). Organizations who have implemented a