December 7, 2014 by Bo Weidema
The stakeholder approach to sustainability indicator development has led to a plethora of different indicator sets. This makes cross-comparisons difficult and is inefficient in terms of resources that need to be spent on measurement and reporting. Furthermore, important aspects of sustainability may be omitted, either because there is no particular stakeholder interest that defends a specific aspect, or due to concerns for data availability. An alternative to the stakeholder approach is a more conceptual approach (these approaches are of course not…
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November 19, 2014 by Bo Weidema
Life Cycle Assessment is not about blaming businesses for negatively impacting environmental or social conditions – rather, it is about identifying leverage points for improving the role of business in society. In many ways, enterprises have the powers to solve issues that societies have struggled with for many years – namely the internalisation of the social (and environmental) externalities. “Creating Shared Value”, “Net positive” and “Handprints” are some of the existing business concepts that aim to shift the focus from…
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September 22, 2014 by Bo Weidema
When systems have more than one product, the ISO standards on LCA recommends avoiding partitioning/allocation of the system by instead “expanding the product system to include the additional functions related to the co-products” (ISO 14044, clause 4.3.4.2). I am sometimes asked: “Is this ‘system expansion’ of ISO not something different from the ‘substitution’ approach (also sometimes described as the ‘avoided burden’ approach) used in consequential LCA?” This lack of clarity in the ISO standards is also sometimes lamented in the…
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July 24, 2014 by Bo Weidema
Last week, I spent 20 hours making more than 30 pages of comments to the three draft guidelines from the FAO Livestock Environmental Assessment Performance (LEAP) Partnership. They are currently in public hearing until July 31st. You can find my comments in our executive club, if you are a club member. There is already a large number of guidelines that interpret the basic ISO 14040/44 standards for LCA for specific products, countries and/or impact categories. Every time a new one is…
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June 10, 2014 by Bo Weidema
My personal interest in social LCA go way back - to the ideas of the fair trade movement and the ideas of organic agriculture of respecting both humans and nature (my original education was as an agriculturalist). In the 1980'ies we tried to formulate these ideas in ways that could be measured and certified. Also, the definition of "environment" in the ISO 14000 is very broad, including the human and social environment, and in line with the awareness that the…
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May 5, 2014 by Bo Weidema
At times I get the impression that there seems to be a widespread confusion with the text of the ILCD Handbook pertaining to modelling choices. The difference between the ILCA situation A (so-called attributional) and situation B (consequential) is described as if relates to the size of the decision, as if small-scale decisions have no real impacts. But if a decision has no impacts, there is no point in modelling it with LCA, is there? If there is an impact, what we…
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February 18, 2014 by Bo Weidema
A new report on environmental profit and loss account (E P&L) for Novo Nordisk has been released. Several interesting new methodological developments are presented in the new E P&L. The geographical scope of Novo Nordisk’s E P&L is unique by applying two different regional EIO tables. The model used was an extended input-output (EIO) table called FORWAST developed by 2.-0 LCA consultants which was even further elaborated during the study. Indirect land-use (ILUC) was integrated in the EIO. The Novo…
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