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    Sustainability Management: Fighting Against Blind Spots

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    irmayenti2
    Customers are increasingly demanding more sustainable and environmentally friendly products. However, companies often struggle to meet these demands while adding business value. Managers suffer from "blind spots" about sustainability opportunities due to a lack of information about a product's full environmental impact over its lifecycle from raw material extraction through disposal. Conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) helps close this information gap. An LCA measures a product's environmental aspects and impacts from "cradle to grave" to identify high impact life cycle stages and improvement opportunities. This provides valuable insights to support decision making across various business functions like product development, marketing, and operations.

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    Sustainability Management: Fighting Against Blind Spots

    Uploaded by

    irmayenti2
    19 views2 pages
    Customers are increasingly demanding more sustainable and environmentally friendly products. However, companies often struggle to meet these demands while adding business value. Managers suffer from "blind spots" about sustainability opportunities due to a lack of information about a product's full environmental impact over its lifecycle from raw material extraction through disposal. Conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) helps close this information gap. An LCA measures a product's environmental aspects and impacts from "cradle to grave" to identify high impact life cycle stages and improvement opportunities. This provides valuable insights to support decision making across various business functions like product development, marketing, and operations.

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    Customers are increasingly demanding more sustainable and environmentally friendly products. However, companies often struggle to meet these demands while adding business value. Managers suffer from "blind spots" about sustainability opportunities due to a lack of information about a product's full environmental impact over its lifecycle from raw material extraction through disposal. Conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) helps close this information gap. An LCA measures a product's environmental aspects and impacts from "cradle to grave" to identify high impact life cycle stages and improvement opportunities. This provides valuable insights to support decision making across various business functions like product development, marketing, and operations.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    19 views2 pages

    Sustainability Management: Fighting Against Blind Spots

    Uploaded by

    irmayenti2
    Customers are increasingly demanding more sustainable and environmentally friendly products. However, companies often struggle to meet these demands while adding business value. Managers suffer from "blind spots" about sustainability opportunities due to a lack of information about a product's full environmental impact over its lifecycle from raw material extraction through disposal. Conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) helps close this information gap. An LCA measures a product's environmental aspects and impacts from "cradle to grave" to identify high impact life cycle stages and improvement opportunities. This provides valuable insights to support decision making across various business functions like product development, marketing, and operations.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    1.

    Sustainability management: Fighting against blind spots

     Customers are increasingly demanding that products be produced in environmentally friendly


    ways that limit negative impacts on the earth’s resources.
     Although today’s customers want more sustainable solutions and information about the
    environmental qualities of the products and services they buy, many companies struggle to
    fulfill these requests while concurrently adding value through mutually beneficial sustainability
     In many companies, the traditional management perspective focuses mainly on customers,
    competitors, internal processes, and relationships with suppliers.
     The critical environmental impact of products are caused not only by product conversion
    processes or product usage, but also by natural and physical traits of raw materials and other
    inputs, extraction methods (e.g., mining, refining), transportation, and storage processes, as well
    as final disposal (e.g., landfilling, incineration, recycling).
     The result is that managers often suffer from blind spots about existing value creation
    opportunities in the markets through sustainability. In particular, this creates two typical
    management problems.
    o First, companies are not aware of relevant strategic opportunities and challenges, which
    can be risky for the long-term development of the company.
    o Second, in the absence of relevant required information, companies have an inherent
    risk of investing in ineffective sustainability improvement measures that are not
    honored by markets and that do not add value for mutual benefit.
     To overcome this blind spot issue in sustainability, as well as to better understand the general
    environmental traits of products and critical sustainability drivers over the entire product life
    cycle, management needs powerful tools that can close the information gap and move the
    company toward a more powerful strategy and product management

    2. From cradle to grave: Life cycle assessment

    LCA is a technique that measures the environmental aspects and impacts of a product over its entire
    lifetime, from cradle to grave (i.e., from raw material extraction through materials processing,
    manufacturing, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal or recycling).

    A life cycle assessment weighs a product or process by asking two main questions: (1) How big are the
    total environmental impact and the corresponding emissions of a product system over its entire
    lifetime? (2) Looking at the different life cycle steps, which life cycle steps are critical and have the
    highest impact on the environment?

    LCA method calculates specific measures for a product or process along several environmental impact
    categories

    3. LCA as a management tool: Value creation areas

    Life cycle assessment creates huge learning value within companies. It is a very powerful support tool
    for decision making that can be of great worth in various areas along the product development and
    implementation, including improving products and processes by optimizing their environmental
    performance or marketing the environmental benefits of products compared to competitive solutions
    4. Path to successful LCA projects: Avoiding potential challenges

    5. LCA extensions for management support

    The eco-improvement analysis is an approach that is used to identify, evaluate, and prioritize potential
    improvement in life cycle steps. Using this analysis a high environmental impact and a relatively large
    improvement at low efforts are identified.

    products are compared and rated along two or three decision-making criteria. The first rating criterion is
    relative environmental performance of the products, based on the results from LCA. The second rating
    criterion is relative price or cost performance of the different products

    LCA can also be used as an interactive consultancy tool to create value on the customer side

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