Diffondo volentieri questa iniziativa dell’UNEP – Life Cycle Initiative.
Dear supporter of the Life Cycle Initiative,
We are very pleased to inform you that “LCA for Organisations” was recently approved as a flagship project within the Phase 3 of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. The main aim of this e-mail, apart from presenting the new project, is to invite you to contribute to it. There are different opportunities for your contribution as proposed below.
For assessing organisations like companies, a life-cycle or supply chain oriented assessment is not yet established as common practice. For that reason, this project aims to demonstrate that the application of the life cycle approach on organizations is relevant, meaningful and already possible.
The discussion on ‘LCA for Organisations’ has been promoted by several initiatives last years. The carbon footprint of organizations was first proposed by the so-called “Supply Chain”- or “Scope 3”-Standard of the WRI/WBCSD GHG-Protocol and by the ISO Technical Report 14069 “Carbon Footprint of Organization”. Those documents and the acquired experience while testing them laid the ground for going to a broader definition of ‘LCA for Organization’. Last year, the European Commission launched the “Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) Guide” and the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) started a project to develop a Standard for LCA of Organisations (ISO 14072).
Within that framework, the “LCA for Organisations” project of the Life Cycle Initiative is intended to perform the following tasks:
· To publish a guidance document for organizations on how to conduct LCA of an organization considering their supply chain. This should serve the background discussion of ISO standard 14072 (LCA for organizations) and include a practical methodology applicable for all sectors. The first draft guidance document should be available by the end of 2013.
· Then it will be consolidated through expert group meetings and thanks to input provided during stakeholder consultations and published in its first version at the end of 2014. The guidance document is supposed to include best practice examples and an outline of effective implementation of LCA for organizations
· In a second phase, the task is to road-test the guidance document in about 10 companies and to update it based on these case studies. That is expected to be done during 2015.
The project is led by Prof. Atsushi Inaba (Kogakuin University, Japan) and Prof. Matthias Finkbeiner (Technical University of Berlin, Germany). Furthermore, Dr. Julia Martínez Blanco (Technical University of Berlin, Germany).will serve as coordinator for the working group developing the guidance document.
If you are interested in this project, we invite you to contribute! There are basically three options for your collaboration:
1. Active participation in the working group: as a working group member you will be actively involved in the drafting of the guidance document and will be invited to meetings. The exchange in the working group will be mainly performed electronically, but one working group meeting/workshop per year is foreseen. The first workshop is planned by the end of 2013.
2. Stakeholder feedback group: if you are not in the position to contribute actively in the working group, but you are still interested in the topic and willing to provide comments on the draft guidance document or any other major result of the working group, you can sign up to the stakeholder feedback group. In this case you will be consulted by email if deliverables are available for comments.
3. Last, but not least, any examples of case studies at the organizational level that are ready to be shared and to be used as examples of the application of LCA on organizations are more than welcome. This can include as a starting point also examples of Scope 3 GHG analysis. In addition to examples from all kinds of companies, we particularly welcome those from developing countries and from public organizations. Any use in the guidance documents will be of course previously agreed upon by the provider of case study information.
Please send us your feedback on the project and indicate the type of collaboration that suits you best by responding to the “Secretariat” by 15 July. We will then come back to you soon with further information about the next steps and the setup of the working group.