This article describes the power of embracing LCA as the core sustainability tool. Many companies are starting to shift from corporate sustainability to product sustainability. Most of the impacts of companies are outside their own boundaries, either in the supply chain or customers. Embracing LCA helps gives sense to supply chain management, innovation, marketing and sales, aligning all the organization on what most matters: the bigger impacts of your products.

1. Cut The Fluff Series 2
How life cycle
assessment
can align
your stars
By Ramon Arratia
November 2011
www.interfaceflorcutthefluff.com
www.interfaceflor.eu/gobeyond

2. How life cycle assessment can align your stars
How life cycle assessment
can align your stars
The idea of life cycle assessment (LCA) has been Many companies still don’t fully account for
around since the 1970s, but companies are this kind of indirect impact, and instead focus
only just beginning to tap into its real potential. 80 per cent of their efforts on managing 20
At InterfaceFLOR, over the last few years we’ve per cent of their impacts: the direct impacts.
realised the truly transformative effect of Most of today’s sustainability management
embracing LCA as a strategic tool. It’s helping concentrates on tools to manage operational
us change the way we approach sustainability, impacts. Carbon management, for example,
providing a common language across the whole usually focuses on improving energy efficiency in
company and helping everyone work together to the company’s operations, using renewables and
focus on solutions for the same key challenges. reducing travel emissions. The emphasis is on
corporate strategies and branding the company’s
We’ve found that LCA has the power to align sustainability story; there is little if any mention of
the stars – to create a consistent approach to product impacts.
sustainability activity in every part of the business
and to get everyone telling the same story. What Many CEOs claim that sustainability is part of their
your product designers focus on is the same as company’s DNA. But it cannot be in the company’s
what your sales force talks about. What you say to DNA until the core thing in the company is radically
your suppliers is the same as what you say to your re-designed: its products. An LCA helps you
customers. And what you report to stakeholders understand the true impact your products have on
is the same as your marketing claims. The the environment. It tells the full story, revealing the
facts generated from the LCA form the basis for impacts in every phase of a product’s life.
everything.
LCA is an established scientific method We’ve found that LCA has the
of assessing the environmental impacts power to align the stars – to
of a product, including carbon footprint, create a consistent approach
resource use or toxicity. It studies all the
impacts throughout the life of a product
to sustainability activity in every
– from extraction and production of raw part of the business and to get
materials to manufacturing, transport, use, everyone telling the same story.
maintenance and end of life disposal.
Evaluating these impacts enables informed
By producing LCAs for all InterfaceFLOR products,
decision-making about how to design, make and
we have discovered that around 70 per cent of
sell products. the overall environmental impact of our carpet
The bigger picture tiles is related to the raw materials used to make
them. Of these, the nylon yarn we use to make our
Crucially, LCA pushes a company to look beyond
carpet tiles has the single biggest environmental
the direct impacts of its own operations. If a
impact. In fact, nylon production accounts for
business makes a product, 60-90 per cent of its
almost half of the impacts across the full life cycle
environmental impacts are likely to be outside the of a carpet tile.
company’s immediate boundaries. Building a car,
for instance, uses energy and raw materials. But LCA showed us that this is our biggest impact,
according to the European Environment Agency, enabling us to focus our efforts where they will
around 77 per cent of a car’s total footprint comes make the biggest difference: reducing the amount
after it has left the factory – when it is driven of yarn we use, finding ways to recycle old yarn
around by consumers. into new, and looking for bio-based alternatives to
The Cut The Fluff Series 2 Ramon Arratia November 2011 02

3. How life cycle assessment can align your stars
nylon. Today we have products with made out of Design and innovation
100% recycled nylon and half the amount of that The first thing that happens when identifying
yarn, cutting by half the overall impact. Before LCA
the key impacts of your product is that you can
we focused primarily on reducing the impact of ourredesign it to reduce those impacts. What gets
own operations, without realising we were missing
measured becomes visible. This immediately
the biggest impact of our business in the supply
gives your designers a clear objective to guide the
chain.
design of your products, focusing on reducing key
impacts rather than ‘feel-good’ green
LCA gives your designers a clear gimmicks. Committing to performing
objective to guide the design of an LCA for every new product before it
is launched gives your designers strong
your products, focusing on reducing signals about what the company wants
key impacts rather than creating from them. If a company didn’t have
‘feel-good’ green gimmicks. an LCA approach, design teams would
start by coming up with a product that is
‘more sustainable’ without knowing what
You too can use LCA to show what matters to your
‘more sustainable’ is. The brainstorming sessions
business, and your products. Start by conducting
come up with concepts like: ‘locally produced’,
an LCA on your most important or popular product.
‘natural’ ingredients or made using wind power. As
Be prepared for the unexpected, and be ready to
a result, time and money can be channelled into
change your strategy as a result.
product re-designs that sound bold and innovative,
Aligning action but make very little difference to the overall impact
The key to the LCA approach is that it provides a of the product. The results of an LCA give design
consistent focus for everyone involved in every teams the opportunity to say ‘OK, we now know
part of the business – from product design and that 80 per cent of the impact is in this area, so
innovation to marketing, sales, procurement, and we need to work on reducing that impact’. It’s a
sustainability reporting. Here’s how it works: no brainer.
Supply Product Design Marketing Sales
Chain and
Innovation
Reporting to government and stakeholders
What you tell your suppliers is the same as what you tell your customers.
What your designers focus on is the same as what your sales force talk about.
What you report to stakeholders is the same as what your marketing claims.
It’s all based on just the facts from LCA.
The Cut The Fluff Series 2 Ramon Arratia November 2011 03

4. How life cycle assessment can align your stars
Supply chain They have no need to come up with another label,
The second thing that happens is that your the message is embedded in the product itself.
product managers tell your purchasing colleagues Sales
to translate the LCA findings to your supplier
Your sales staff can now enter the same LCA facts
requirements. At InterfaceFLOR, once we knew
into tenders and sales material. At InterfaceFLOR
that the biggest impact was from virgin nylon yarn,
our sales people used to tell the story of Mission
we asked our suppliers to come up with a way to
Zero – our promise to eliminate any negative
give us 100 per cent recycled nylon yarn. One of
impact on the environment by 2020 – when our
them, Aquafil, invested in a re-polymerisation plant
customers were just asking about the impacts of
the carpet tile they were buying. Now they
Having the facts printed in have something far more tangible to focus
promotional materials cut the on. The LCA means they can tell customers
exactly what the impact of a product is
greenwash, the funny labels across its lifecycle and enables them to
and the self-serving claims. The compare this with other products in our
marketing is done by the facts. range. Printing this information on marketing
materials means your sales guys have
no scope for sexing up stories, because
to meet this demand and is now delivering 100
the facts are right there in front of them and the
per cent recycled yarn made from old nylon fishing
customer. What is more re-assuring? If I tell you to
nets. LCA enables you to set clear expectations of
trust me, that all my company’s products are good
suppliers where it matters, asking them to come
for the environment? Or if I tell you: this product
up with radical, practical innovations that will help
has 5.7kgCO2 and this one has 12.9kgCO2. I am
you significantly reduce product impacts. Supply
not going to patronise you, you have the hard facts
chain management becomes less complicated
– along with other factors such as design, price
too. Instead of sending suppliers 700-question
or service – you can use those facts to make a
questionnaires with requests such as ‘do you purchasing decision.
have an environmental policy?’ or ‘have
you signed up to the Global Compact?’, Consumers don’t ask car
you can talk to them directly about how
they can help you reduce the impact of
companies for the sustainability
your product. How transformative is a box report. They say: cut the fluff and
ticking questionnaire compared with asking tell me the gCO2/km.
suppliers to respond just to your biggest
environmental challenge? Customers
Marketing Forget the consumers, my mum in the
supermarket doesn’t care, she doesn’t have time
Once your suppliers have helped your innovation
to look at the facts. But there are other customers
colleagues to produce more sustainable
who do, especially these three types: governments
products, it enables your marketing department
who have committed to public procurement but
to make environmental claims based on fact, don’t know how to make the decisions because
not greenwash. The marketeers now have a product providers can’t give them the facts they
ready-made ‘angle’ for the product, as they are need; B2B buyers such as architects designing
promoting something that ha s been designed green buildings; and retailers like Walmart
to be sustainable. They no longer have to come driving carbon emissions reductions across its
up with a post-justification for the product’s supply chain. The demand for plain facts as
sustainability. Like everyone else in your opposed to catchy labels or stretched claims
company, the marketing team can now focus on can only increase. This is the interesting bit
communicating the big impacts that really matter. about stars aligning, when customers also align
The Cut The Fluff Series 2 Ramon Arratia November 2011 04

5. How life cycle assessment can align your stars
to LCA thinking then things happen. And if your Following the rules for LCA
company is tuned into that customer demand for Of course LCA is not foolproof. If you use
transparency, then you have a huge competitive unrealistic assumptions to underpin your
advantage. assessments then you can come up with
Sustainability reporting unrealistic figures. For instance, if you assume that
your product has a lifespan of 20 years when really
Finally, the LCA approach simplifies environmental
it will last only 10, then you will be halving the
reporting. Until now, most companies have looked
overall impact.
to stakeholders to guide them on which material
issues to focus their activity and reporting on. That’s why you need to do LCAs following product
This might work well for social and ethical issues, category rules that fix the assumptions so
but why spend so much time creating materiality that competitors’ products can be compared.
matrices and asking self-appointed stakeholders Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs),
who have no way of assessing the real impacts based on LCAs, are produced in a standardized
of your business on the environment? An LCA form recognised by the International Standards
tells you what those impacts are with no room for Organisation. InterfaceFLOR has committed to
argument. produce EPDs for all its products by the end of
2012.
With an LCA, your company can cut the fluff and
report performance on the impacts that matter With these rules in place, LCAs enable transparent
most. No longer do you need a glossy corporate comparability of product environment impacts
responsibility report that cherrypicks a few ‘green’ and they can provide the missing link to join up
projects. Instead you can offer a robust report disparate sustainability initiatives within your
about how you are redesigning your products to business. Not many companies have realised this
cut impacts. yet. But the move towards product sustainability
has started – led by companies such as Unilever,
The way forward Tesco, and PepsiCo. Isn’t it time your company
More companies are shifting their thinking from joined the movement?
corporate to product sustainability. Slowly we are
moving on from ‘The CSR decade’, which has
been characterised by doing nice things and telling
everybody about them. The new era, with LCA at
its core, will be more about product sustainability,
transparency and providing ‘just the facts’:
embedding the story into products that speak for
themselves. Corporate responsibility departments
in many companies have ended up spending their
time and effort on management processes that
don’t focus on the biggest impacts. Using LCAs
as the cornerstone of sustainability will allow
companies to concentrate – and report - on the
full environmental impacts of their business and
their products, focusing as much, if not more, on
impacts outside the company boundary.
For some service companies, the use of LCAs
might not be so revelatory, as most of their
environmental impacts are likely to be in-house.
But LCAs will still show you where you need to
concentrate your efforts, and they will still help to
bring alignment across the company.
The Cut The Fluff Series 2 Ramon Arratia November 2011 05

6. How life cycle assessment can align your stars
About InterfaceFLOR
InterfaceFLOR is the modular flooring division of US-based Interface Inc. The company is a
worldwide leader in the design and production of high-quality, stylish, innovative modular floor
coverings.
Interface was one of the first companies to publicly commit to sustainability, when it made a
‘Mission Zero’ pledge in the mid-nineties to eliminate its impact on the environment by 2020.
Mission Zero influences every business, manufacturing and design decision made and inspires the
company to continually go beyond current business models, practices and solutions in order to
achieve its goal.
Interface is now more than half way to reaching its Mission Zero goal and has been widely
recognised for its achievements to date.
About the author
Ramon Arratia is the Sustainability Director InterfaceFLOR EMEAI. His focus is on continuing to
develop the company’s sustainability strategy towards Mission Zero as well as reviewing products,
services and business processes to ensure that they are as sustainable as possible.
Ramon plays a leading role in InterfaceFLOR’s ‘Let’s be clear’ campaign, an anti-greenwash drive
calling for full transparency in how companies declare the environmental impact of their products.
He has also been instrumental in InterfaceFLOR commitment to have all products covered by
Environment Product Declarations (EPDs) by 2012. Ramon is also leading InterfaceFLOR’s ‘war on
waste’ campaign, an initiative which calls for action to change European Waste Legislation within
the flooring and construction industry.
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