Page 29 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

10 LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT HANDBOOK

of goal setting in environmental policy in the EU, and it never has been in the
US and Japan.
This shift in public and private concerns may have severe impacts on
the development of LCA. With the impact assessment shifting to in-system
subjects, system boundaries become less clearly defined, and the environ-
mental issues of the themes approach are not covered by 'full system analy-
sis/ The overall analytics of the impact assessment in terms of midpoints
categories and endpoint categories is left with the new impacts of energy,
resources and waste, very similar to the old ones of early LCA in the US in
the Seventies.

Box 1.1 The Role of Life Cycle Assessment in Unilever (a Personal
Account)

Back in 1991, Chris Dutilh, then Development and Environmental Manager
of Unilever's margarine company in the Netherlands (then called Van den
Bergh & Jürgens) got approval from his Managing Director to hire some-
one to do Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The undersigned was the lucky
man. LCA in those days was an emerging concept. SETAC (Society for
Environmental Technology and Chemistry) had taken the lead in method-
ology development. Application of LCA in food and agriculture had not
really been done yet. But in the Netherlands the first Covenant on Packaging
had been signed between industry and government. The Covenant called
for voluntary reductions (on the part of industry) of packaging volumes
used, and LCA seemed an appropriate tool to analyse various options.
Between 1991 and 1993,1 had the pleasure of conducting various LCAs
of different packaging systems. Unilever Netherlands had taken the lead
on the product group mayonnaise, mustard, jams and dressings (anything
in jars and bottles that was not a drink). We used LCAs to investigate
various options to reduce weight of glass jars (always good), switch from
glass to plastics (not always straightforward), or change the cap material
(very dependent on recycling options of the cap material). Glass recovery
and recycling was already at rather high level in the Netherlands at the
time (over 80% of packaging glass recovered, if memory serves me well).
We also investigated a re-use scenario. One way glass packaging had
been introduced some fifteen odd years before. The result of our scenario
study (which was supported by the Unilever engineering department, to
get the details of our glass jar washing plant as realistic as possible) was
that reuse of glass jars had considerable environmental benefit, but also
serious cost implications, mostly labour cost. In other words: negative
environmental impact could be reduced by putting more labour in the
supply chain.
The work on LCA moved to Unilever R&D in Port Sunlight, UK,
and became a department within Unilever's Safety and Environmental