As part of our commitment to our mission (improve the health of people, plants and biomes) and to the Sustainable Development Goals, and really because we are interested to know what our carbon footprint is and how to manage it, we embarked on a six-month long project to conduct a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA).
A Life cycle analysis or assessment is a methodology for assessing the environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the life cycle of a commercial product, process, or service. For instance, in the case of a manufactured product such as the PhytlSigns device, environmental impacts are assessed from raw material extraction and processing (cradle), through the product's manufacture, distribution and use, to the recycling or final disposal of the materials composing it (grave). The environmental impacts can be measured in terms of the carbon footprint (Greenhouse gases or CO2 equivalent), water use, and impact on biodiversity.
In addition to the environmental impact of the device itself, one can attempt to measure the impact (footprint) of the research and development costs that have gone into the design of the device as well as the on-going impacts of supporting its development, marketing and sale. These are also known as Scope 3 – upstream and downstream activities in the parlance of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
Just this little introduction will give you an idea of how quickly what we thought would be a relatively simple task of popping a few figures into a spreadsheet and getting a CO2e figure for the footprint of our device, would turn into a complex and at times frustrating exercise.
LCAs are incredibly complex, and it is almost impossible to conduct one without professional support. In addition, the process requires digging into databases to get figures for each component or service (usually in kg CO2e) that can be used for the calculations. These databases are expensive to access, and consultants generally have subscriptions to these to carry out their work.
To meet the requirements for the analysis, we needed to identify every component that makes up the PhytlSigns device, we even weighed some of these. We went back to the company that assembles our device for more information on the provenance of each device. We estimated the number of hours that our device is likely to run in a year, its life expectancy and the number of devices needed per hectare.
I am going to keep you in suspense until the next blog to let you know what we discovered about the footprint of our device during this process and leave you with the human side of the experience.
As Vivent’s Sustainability Manager, I engaged with our software and hardware developers as well as our data scientists to estimate the amount of data that we store on servers, which also have a carbon footprint. Across the company, colleagues became interested in the project as they saw that it was not just an academic exercise but an important reflection on how we plan for the next generation of devices, how we think about business travel, how long we keep our phones and laptops for, and even how we dispatch our device to our customers has a significant impact.
The LCA process has raised awareness across the team on the environmental impact of all our activities. The process requires adjusting to a level of assumptions that not everyone was comfortable with, but the results have been eye-opening and positive. Look out for Part 2 coming soon!