Sustainability can sometimes feel like an overwhelming concept and an even harder principle to incorporate into business operations. There is a powerful tool that can help navigate this complex terrain – called Life Cycle Thinking (LCT). In this blog post, we'll break down LCT in layman's terms and explain why it makes sense to manage your sustainability journey with this method.
What Is LCT?
Life Cycle Thinking is a crucial part of the movement towards creating a circular economy. At its core, LCT is a mindset, applied as a holistic approach to evaluating a product’s entire lifecycle. This evaluation creates a decision-making framework in which a sustainability strategy and purpose-driven culture can be developed. LCT is a concept that goes beyond reducing a product's environmental impact. It's about redefining resilience, innovation, value, trust, and even the core purpose of an organization. This approach provides structure to the intricate and multifaceted challenge of sustainability, helping us see how profit, the planet, and people are interconnected – the trifecta called the Triple Bottom Line.
LCT uses stakeholder interviews and data – both primary and secondary – to map, weigh, and contextualize every stage of a product's life cycle. These stages involve inputs and outputs, which can be environmental (energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, etc.) or social and economic (stakeholder attitudes, competitive norms, geopolitical influences).
The possibilities of what LCT can deliver are extensive and unique to each business's goals and sustainability journey. Examples include incorporating eco-design principles into product development, enhancing your product roadmap, improving supplier evaluation criteria, refining customer engagement strategies, and optimizing manufacturing layouts.
How Does Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Fit In?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an ISO standardized tool that quantifies trade-offs when deciding where to apply resources for impact. While LCT doesn't mandate LCA, it provides crucial substantiation for impact claims, especially in regulated sectors like healthcare. LCA helps ensure that your sustainability efforts aren't just greenwashing – they're backed by data. An LCA can provide evidentiary support for an ongoing LCT process.
Who's Involved in LCT?
Involvement in LCT should extend to individuals both within and beyond the organization. This allows for insights across a wide range of roles and functions – workers, executives, suppliers, consumers, shareholders, competitors, and community members. These stakeholders are all important in mapping and weighing each stage of the product life cycle, as well as executing resulting strategies. In LCT, every job in a business becomes a sustainability job.
When and Where Does LCT Apply?
LCT can focus on a single element like package design, or be applied to the entire structure of an organization. Traditionally, product development follows a linear take-make-waste model, involving raw material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use and maintenance, and end-of-life. LCT promotes circularity and a Cradle-To-Cradle model, giving value to recovered waste byproducts and minimizing end-of-life. This approach can also help delay crossing any more of the 9 Planetary Boundaries for the Earth to continue to sustain life, only one of which is climate.
The 1-10-100 Principle applies to LCT, emphasizing that the earlier an issue is corrected (i.e. reducing raw material extraction), then the less effort and cost to correct it later. There is a higher return on investment for upstream preventions compared to downstream interventions like recycling, which businesses have less control over.
Transportation is also a key factor considered in LCT, as it impacts every stage of a product's life cycle. While it may not be directly controlled internally, transportation often represents a significant portion of total impact.
Example Case Study: Lush Cosmetics
Lush Cosmetics embeds its values at every stage of their products' life cycles. Starting with the design of its formulations and recycled pots, advocacy for social and environmental causes (like fighting animal testing), inspiring systemic change, and down to materials used in store design.
LCT in Each Life Cycle Stage:
1. Raw Material Extraction - Lush has simplified their supply chain by creating direct relationships with the growers to ensure that their ingredients are natural, vegetarian or vegan, and that suppliers are operating ethically in their communities.
2. Processing - A commitment to freshness drives Lush to balance the impact of expedited ingredient transportation with reduced processing and use of preservatives.
3. Manufacturing - Lush incorporates water and energy efficienct strategies into the handcrafting of their products.
4. Distribution - Solid formulations and "naked" packaging reduce the impact and cost of transporting unnecessary weight.
5. End-of-life - "Bring it Back" programs and reusable cork containers encourage circularity and engage consumers in the values of Lush.
Why Embrace LCT?
Life Cycle Thinking can lead to numerous benefits for your business, including:
Cost savings by reducing material waste.
Mitigation of regulatory risk by staying ahead of policy changes.
Gaining control of product quality and saving on transportation cost by internalizing operations.
Gaining a competitive advantage in the market through innovation.
Improved brand reputation through transparency and alignment with consumer values.
The discovery of new sales opportunities and industry collaborations.
Decreased dependency on finite or volatile resources.
Standardization of processes for repeatability.
Attraction and retention of top talent.
To start improving resilience, innovation, value, trust, and your core purpose through your products, reach out to us today and take a significant step towards shaping a more sustainable future for your business.
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