Sustainable Product Life Cycles

1. Sustainable Product Life Cycles • Since Bruntland Report (Our Common Future), many discussions on defining sustainability in practical terms and on how it might be achieved - general agreement that there are both environmental and economic elements to S.D. • Economically sustainable development essential to improve continuously the standard of living of the world’s population. Environmental sustainability required to ensure this is achieved without any environmental deterioration in this or future generations. • One response must be in the use of raw materials, goods and services - to provide more value from goods and services from use of less resources and production of less wastes and emissions - the “more from less” approach has led to the introduction of products and packages which provide real environmental benefits and indicates further ways to further optimise product lifestyles • Even with optimum product lifecycles, there will still be solid wastes remaining at end of each lifecycle - we must apply the more from less approach also to solid waste management. • S.D. requires many partnerships if to become established - in particular shared responsibility needed between manufacturers of individual products and those authorities that plan and operate society’s infrastructure.

2. Overall Environmental Management • Governments and industry need to manage environmental matters - complicated and multi-faceted operation - multi-nationals operate in many countries and produce wide range and variety of products - no one environmental tool can cover all dimensions - some of these tools have been derived from the environmental sciences whilst others are more traditional business management tools. Effective decision making requires that the information form these many available tools is integrated. • An Environmental Management Framework shows how the various tools can be used, along with experience and judgement, for overall environmental management within an individual company - environmentally and economically sustainable environment management is the overall objective - four separate elements:- 1. Ensuring human and environmental safety 2. Ensuring regulatory compliance 3. Ensuring efficient resource use and waste management, and 4. Addressing societal concerns For each element, several different tools can be of use; conversely some tools serve more that one element. • For a consumer goods company - prime importance to ensure that products, packaging and operations are safe, for consumers, production workers and environment. Safety must be ensured through all stages of a products manufacture, use and disposal. Requires:- i) use of well established tools of human and ecological risk assessment ii) need to ensure compliance with all health and environmental regulations and legislation iii) efficient use of resources and management of wastes i.e. more from less.

3. More From Less - Products and Packaging • More from less - requires the efficient use of resources and management of wastes and emissions - looking beyond traditional boundary of the factory gate - requires a lifecycle approach to consider all of the stages of a product’s lifecycle. • Monitoring of individual site emissions important, using site-specific tools (e.g. risk assessment and manufacturing site wastes reporting) but it is clearly necessary to look at what happens to product and its packaging elsewhere in the lifecycle to identify where the most significant environmental improvements can be made. • One tool within overall env’tal management framework to improve resource use and waste management is LIFECYCLE INVENTORY (LCI) • Involves constructing an inventory of all material and energy inputs and outputs of a product or packaging system. • ‘Cradle to grave’ approach - include all of the inputs and outputs from all processes, from all locations in the lifecycle of the product or packaging. All stages - raw material extraction, manufacture, distribution, use and then waste management. • With this broad perspective, LCI’s can be used for:- • Optimisation of the lifecycle - where are the largest environmental burdens? • Prevention of problems shifting - ensure that improvements made in one part of lifecycle do not produce greater deteriorations at another stage, time or place in the lifecycle. • Allocating all env’tal burdens to the particular service provided - lifecycle approach unique in that it looks along the product or package dimension and calculates overall env’tal burdens. Allows comparison of burden with value of service provided - a value: impact assessment.

4. Using Lifecycle Inventory for Products and Packaging • Value of lifecycle approach - allows comparison of different ways in which products can be packaged - compare options that are re-useable, refillable, returnable or recyclable with one way packages that use less material in the first place (i.e. source reduction). Tests the view that ‘recyclable or re-useable packaging must be better’. • Lifecycle approach in general and LCI in particular allows designers and manufacturers to optimise the use of raw materials and energy and the management of emissions and wastes across the whole lifecycle of products and packages. Successful strategies may include - raw material choice, use of recycle materials, light weighting, product concentration, energy efficient processing, optimised distribution networks, and design for subsequent recycling or energy recovery. Key objective is to provide the service to society in most resource - efficient way. Gaining Insights from a Lifecycle Approach to Products • Lifecycle thinking can provide new insights since it broadens the perspective - studies of lifecycles for products such as cars demonstrates that major env’tal burdens occur in ‘use’ phase of the lifecycle. Similarly for service (say washing clothes) - lifecycle inventory for a detergent product showed that the majority of energy consumption and solid waste generation over the lifecycle arose from the heating of the water and the running of the washing machine, rather than the sourcing , making or packaging of the product. Heating water accounted for 50% of total energy consumption and over 30% of total solid waste generation. Conclusion could be that to reduce environmental burdens - formulate a product that performs well at low temperature

5. Sustainable Waste Management • No matter how well optimised, the product and package lifecycle - inevitably some post-use solid waste to be managed - MSW is usually the responsibility of the LA - the development of more sustainable product lifecycles therefore requires a partnership approach involving both designers and manufacturers of products and the planners and operators of the waste management systems. • Companies could for example work with the European Recovery and Recycling Association (ERRA), the Organic Reclamation and Composting Association (ORCA) and the European Energy from Waste Coalition (EEWC) to promote an integrated and sustainable approach to solid waste management. • Objectives - initially to ensure human and env’tal safety and regulatory compliance. Today there is the additional requirement of efficient use of resources and management of emissions to ensure solid waste management is sustainable. Integrated Waste Management (IWM) • No one single treatment can handle all materials in MSW in an environmentally efficient way - following a suitable collection system - a range of treatment options is required including materials recovery, biological treatment (composting/and/or biogasification), thermal treatment (burning of refuse-derived fuel (RDF), packaging - derived fuel (PDF) and/or mass-burn incineration) and landfilling - together an IWM system

6. Using Lifecycle Inventory for IWM • Some “More from less” approach used for products can be used to optimise waste management. A waste management system should be able to extract more value from the waste prior to final disposal (recovered secondary materials, compost and/or energy) and from the consumption of less energy and other resources in the process. • Such optimisation of solid waste management requires the ability to compare different integrated systems, to make choices and identify where improvements can be made. Until now, such choices based on the so-called hierarchy of waste management options. Exact form varies but normally as shown (“Hierarchy of Waste Management Options”). • Relying on the hierarchy has three major limitations:- 1. It has no technical or scientific basis 2. Is of little use in considering combinations of options - cannot tell us if a waste management system with materials recycling and landfilling of the residues is better or worse than a system with composting of organics and incineration of the remaining material. While it lists treatment options in a “priority” order, it does not allow comparisons of integrated combinations of options. 3. It does not address economic sustainability. Waste management systems need to be affordable to all sectors of the community that they serve, including householders, institutions, l.a.’s and industry. What is important in optimisation of waste management systems is comparison of overall environmental burdens and overall economic costs.

7. An LCI Model for Solid Waste Management • Essentially model considers the overall energy balance, the amounts of useful products (e.g. compost and recovered materials) and the emissions to air, water and land, associated with managing the municipal waste of a given area. Covers the lifecycle of waste from ‘dustbin to grave’ (time from the materials are discarded by householder to time they become inert landfill material, emissions to air or water, or regain value as useful products. All operations within the waste management system, including the actions of the householder in handling the waste are included. Comparing Solid Waste Management Systems • LCI model can be used to - compare different ways of handling MSW - consider the waste generated by an area and how it can be managed - compare collection from kerbside or use of civic amenity sites • Can involve the use of composting or biogasification for organic materials, use of materials recovery facility to separate and process recycleables, the use of thermal treatments such as mass-burn incineration, burning refuse derived fuel (rdf) or packaging - derived fuel (pdf) and the use of landfilling • Any combination of the above treatment methods can be explored in the ‘what if’ calculations.

8. Comparing Solid Waste Management Systems (cont’d) • For each of options, possible to calculate the overall, energy consumption and emissions to air, water and land associated with managing the waste. • Providing the priorities for environmental improvements have been decided (e.g. conservation of energy, groundwater protection, etc. the preferred option can be identified • An LCI will not by itself, identify which option is ‘environmentally best’ - this will depend on what are considered the most pressing environmental problems in each case.

9. Insights from using LCI for Waste Management • As well as overall comparisons already described, an equally valid use of LCI is to identify where significant burdens exist in the lifecycle of waste - allowing improvement efforts to be targeted. For waste management this yields some interesting (and perhaps unexpected) insights, especially into the overall effects of householder behaviour. • Considering a basic scenario for UK household waste management (commingled collection of household waste followed by landfilling) shows how different actions by the householders will affect the overall energy consumption of the system - practices such as using extra collection bags, washing out bins, etc, can almost double the energy consumption of the whole waste management system. Using a car to make special journey to materials recycling banks can more than double the overall energy consumption - repeated in every household can have a major overall effect. Again demonstrates benefit of a lifecycle approach in showing where significant burdens can occur - suggests where any effort and money could be well spent (e.g. on householder education). Overall Optimisation of Product Lifecycles This use of LCI for waste management differs fundamentally from the use of LCI for products or packages - Product LCI’s look at whole lifecycle of individual products (from cradle to grave) - i.e. a vertical analysis. The LCI for waste management looks at the lifecycle of waste, from moment materials lose value to the moment they either regain value (as recovered materials) or become emissions to air, waste or land. Thus the horizontal analysis looks at part of the individual lifecylces of all the products and packages used by society.

10. Overall Optimisation of Product Lifecycles (cont’d) • Lifecycle inventory can therefore be applied in two different ways to help develop sustainable product lifecycles • Firstly, LCI can be applied to individual products and packages to optimise their lifecycles from an environmental perspective. These ‘vertical’ LCIs can be performed by the designers and manufacturers of the products and packages in question. • Secondly, LCI can be used to optimise the management of solid waste itself - a ‘horizontal’ LCI. • Clearly the two LCI approaches overlap. Part of all product LCIs will be concerned with the time each product or package spends in the waste management system. Conversely, the LCI for waste consists of adding together the waste management stages of all products and packages. • However, they represent two distinct tools for two different user groups. Product LCIs will be used by those who design, manufacture products/packages and will help them deliver a service to society in a material and energy efficient manner. LCIs for solid waste will be of use to those responsible for manufacture of solid waste, to help them optimise management of wastes from the community. • The two optimisation processes for products and waste management will interact - as products and packages are optimised, the resultant solid waste entering the waste system will alter. Similarly, as waste manufacture systems are optimised, the waste management stage of every product and package will be altered.

11. Overall Optimisation of Product Lifecycles (cont’d) • Ideally, the answer would be to include both product and package lifecycles and the waste lifecycle in one system which could then be optimised. In practice, however, this would mean optimising the production and disposal of all products and packages, over all stages of their lifecycle. In short the environmental optimisation of industrial society. Not feasible, at least currently! • At present the use of separate ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ analyses (i.e. the use of LCIs of products/packages by designers, manufacturers and the use of LCI for solid waste by waste managers and waste policy makers offers the best potential. • The approach of having separate LCI tools can be taken further - we have seen that energy consumption can have significant environmental burdens over a product’s lifecycle/transport can contribute significantly to overall lifecycle burdens. • Thus a need for co-ordinate action by all actors involved in the lifecycle of products. If separate LCI tools were used by all actors to optimise the parts of the lifecycle under their own control, overall this would lead to more sustainable product lifecycles.

12. Conclusions • Lifecycle inventory (LCI) has been shown to be a very useful tool, within the overall environmental man. framework, for ensuring resource use and waste management - can be used by a designer or manufacturer on a specific product or package lifecycle, or to optimise such operations as waste man. or energy generation. • By taking a ‘cradle to grave’ approach, it helps ensure that environmental improvements in one area are not outweighed by greater problems elsewhere in lifecycle - i.e. that proposed changes are real environmental improvements. • However, an environmentally improved product will only deliver this benefit if it is sold and used in a replacement of a product with a poorer environmental performance - to be sold, products must provide the value consumers require - performance and price. Both economic and environmental factors need to be considered to ensure a product lifecycle is sustainable.