Page 28 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

ENVIRONMENTAL LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT 9

Decision making on product systems developed in a period when planning
and control was the dominant mode of organisation, with the "owner" having
control over the supply chain. However, in the period that LCA emerged the
planning concepts started to shift. When discussing chain management with
the environmental officer of Nokia, there was a startling reaction: "How can
we?" Nokia had a policy to have all their suppliers renewed through com-
petitive bids every three months. But supply chain developments did not stop
there. With globalisation large firms now tend to outsource production, with
also chain management outsourced. Big brands do development and market-
ing and shift the production to the chain as much as possible, to reduce costs
and risks. Exceptions are where consumers are the driving force for LCA, as
with branded consumer products, especially food, and with special NGO
action-based cases, like Nike.
The link with environmental-based public policy then becomes weaker,
also because such theme- based approaches are less frequent in public policy
making now, or at least shifting to new themes. There is a tendency to shift
the analysis to applied subjects dominant in public discussion, like resources,
energy, waste and land use. These however are not environmental impacts,
but aspects of concern, for several reasons, including environmental ones.
Resources are a supply problem mostly related to costs and to market failure,
leading to nationalist policies to safeguard supply. The underlying depletion
aspect, leading to increasing environmental impacts in primary production,
would have been covered by the themes approach as in terms of acidification,
climate change, etc. Similarly, energy is a concern also because of costs and
supply security, hardly being environmental issues. There are more fossil fuel
resources available than the earth can accommodate pleasantly for mankind.
The climate issue was there already, and it still is. It does not require a special
energy impact, although, of course, energy use plays a dominant role in the cli-
mate problem. Depending on the way exergy and heat are produced and used,
and on the volumes involved, there will be environmental impacts in terms of
the LCA themes, including climate change. The specification of 'waste' now
tends to include waste to-be-processed, to focus on recycling issues, implying a
system boundary not with the environment. When looking at the environmen-
tal issues covered in the public discussions on firms, there is a clear tendency
to shift to domain-specific indicators in the chain, again leaving the principle
of system definition to cover all processes to linking to the environment.
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI, 2012) covers the environmental
reporting of firms, especially multinational ones. They do not adhere to a
themes approach and tend to apply indicators 'within the system/ to use tra-
ditional LCA terms. For example, there are customized indices for sectors like
financial services, electric utilities, NGOs, food processing, mining & metals,
airport operators, and construction & real estate. The reporting is to cover
what to external parties is deemed relevant. There is no well-defined con-
ceptual basis for specifying such concerns. The once globally dominant posi-
tion of the EU in conceptualizing environmental policy seems to have been
eroded. The environmental themes approach is no longer the dominant mode