December 11, 2017 by Bo Weidema
Last week I attended a meeting on the EU commission’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) arranged by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. The PEF initiative was presented as providing a level playing field for competition on environmental claims, countering the current situation that many (allegedly 95% of all environmental claims) are misleading. The PEF pilot phase is now coming to and end, and the Commission representative presented the result as a success story: “We now have a machine that works!” although…
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October 30, 2017 by Bo Weidema
Since the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) were published 2 years ago, much has been said on the difficulty in implementing them into business practice. Part of the difficulty comes from the wordings, which often appear better suited for governmental use than specifically for use in a business context. But the main difficulty comes from the sheer number of goals (17) and accompanying targets (169) and indicators (so far 230). While this should provide something for everyone, it also implies an…
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September 30, 2017 by Jannick Schmidt
This year we celebrate more than 10 years of focussed research on Land Use Change (LUC) and indirect Land Use Change (iLUC). We do this with a free webinar on iLUC modelling for up to 100 people on November 15th. Our first publications that included land use effect were about rapeseed and palm oil, and were part of my Ph.D. thesis: Life cycle assessment of rapeseed oil and palm oil from 2007. Ten years later, we are still developing the models…
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August 7, 2017 by Bo Weidema
At the core of the circular economy concept we find the closing of material cycles through recycling of by-products and wastes (what some people call the “End-of-Life”, see also my earlier blog-post). Recycling is also a topic that has been investigated widely in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), but here it has turned out to be one of the most difficult areas in which to ensure correct information and to avoid greenwashing. Many seek to use recycling as an argument for avoiding…
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July 25, 2017 by Bo Weidema and Manuel Klarmann, Eaternity
Distributed Ledger Technology, informally nicknamed “blockchain” or “hashgraph” depending on its core database concept, is a new decentralised digital network technology that has the power to disrupt many existing business practices, including banking, insurance, government services and trade, by radically reducing the cost of financial transactions and contract enforcement. In this blog-post, we investigate how the Distributed Ledger Technology may disrupt the way businesses supply consumers with information on the social or ecosystem impacts of their products – information that…
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May 26, 2017 by Bo Weidema
In a previous blog-post, I used this picture to illustrate the gap between the available information (the large circles) and how much of this information is typically used by current LCA practice (the smaller circles within each large one): At 2.-0 LCA consultants we have been working hard to ensure that we use the most recent, transparent, reviewed, and spatially detailed data, modelling economic activities with data from globally complete and physically balanced IO-databases, including rebound effects based on marginal…
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April 24, 2017 by Jannick Schmidt
At their plenary session this month, the Members of Parliament voted on a resolution calling on the European Commission to work towards a European certification scheme for palm oil entering the EU market. This political move comes at a most opportune moment for us here at 2.-0 LCA consultants; as we just this week are able to announce that our crowd-funded initiative: LCA of RSPO certified palm oil is up and running with currently 12 palm oil producing/using industries as members…
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March 15, 2017 by Bo Weidema
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that 2.-0 LCA consultants advocates a strict interpretation of the ISO 14040-series of standards for LCA to mean that a consequential modelling approach shall be used whenever the results are to be applied for decision support. Our advocacy for the consequential approach is based on its superior ability to reflect the physical and economic causality of changes in product systems. The alternative modelling approach, which has come to…
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February 23, 2017 by Bo Weidema
The employees of 2.-0 LCA consultants have access to a new piece of office equipment: An under-desk cycle. While we for many years have seen our colleagues standing at their height-adjustable tables, the new equipment allows for actively moving the legs, while seated at the table. The investment in the new equipment is a spin-off of our recent study of how the 2015 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study can be related to product life cycles, as part of our…
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January 26, 2017 by Michele De Rosa
Last November the SETAC scientific committee accepted our session proposal for the upcoming SETAC Europe Annual Meeting to be held in Brussels in May 2017 titled ’Advancements in Hybrid Life Cycle Assessment methodologies and analyses’. This session represents a much needed opportunity for improving current LCA methodology. LCA is today a well-established science-based comparative assessment tool. As part of its integrated product policy the European Commission has concluded that LCA is “the best framework for assessing the potential environmental impacts…
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