Nokia publishes sustainability report 2011

Our customer Nokia published its sustainability report for 2011. Nokia uses life cycle assessment to calculate the environmental impact of their products and processes. LCAs help them identify and focus on the areas where they can make the biggest reductions.

You can find the full sustainability report here

New Video – Unlock the Value of Product Sustainability in Manufacturing

Missed our latest webinar? Watch the video to gain valuable insight into the latest trends surrounding product life cycle thinking in the industrial manufacturing sector and learn from real-life leadership examples for radically increasing the business value of sustainability programs:

• Develop innovative products and generate more revenue

• Realize cost savings while becoming greener

• Improve the quality of your products and processes 

Find out how industry leaders are…

…Driving top-line revenue growth by becoming the preferred supplier to corporate customers

…Reducing costs by understanding environmental impacts and eliminating waste

…Managing risk by identifying environmental “hotspots” and mitigating the impact of sub-optimal materials or processes

…Enhancing brand value through improved transparency and communicating with customers about progress in environmental performance

…Creating innovative products that offer both better utility and lower environmental impact

     Watch the video

A new era of sustainability performance management

SoFi 5, the new Enterprise Sustainability Performance solution by PE INTERNATIONAL, received a warm welcome by customers and market experts alike.

With the highly anticipated introduction of the software in April 2012, PE enters into a new era of sustainability performance management solutions that leverage sustainability content to help organizations transform sustainability data into insights and implement the most profitable sustainability initiatives. SoFi 5 features 15,000 industry benchmarks; 130,000 impact profiles (emission factors and risk profiles) as well as 130,000 due diligence projects including implementation cost and Return On Investment.

Newest release one year ahead of competition

In previews and launch briefings, industry analysts praised the intuitive gap analysis and powerful benchmarking against industry averages and complemented the effortless drill-down into sustainability performance indicators. Especially, the intelligent diagnostics engine that intuitively produces recommendations based on a company’s industry sector and site location was perceived as “at least one year ahead of competitive offerings” by a market insider familiar with other sustainable business solutions.

Customers are raving about new enterprise solution

In an exclusive webinar series corporate managers experienced live how they can achieve improved Enterprise Sustainability Performance with SoFi 5. Afterwards, participating SoFi clients such as Dole, Adidas and EAC as well as sustainability professionals from other organizations raved about the new software solution. As one client, who currently manages sustainability performance indicators for over 200 sites in SoFi, put it: “The new SoFi 5 software has blown us away. Last year, we chose SoFi 4.3 because it was the only environmental performance management solution that met our expectations. But SoFi 5 has now raised the bar again, going beyond our expectations.”

Join our free SoFi 5 live demonstration

If you missed the SoFi 5 launch webinars and would like to catch up on Enterprise Sustainability Performance, register now for our next webinar “Experience Enterprise Sustainability Performance in new SoFi 5 - live!”

New Zealand LCA conference – Review

The 2nd New Zealand Life Cycle Assessment Conference “LCA: A Business Compass for Sustainability,” was held in Auckland on 28-29 March 2012. The conference focused on the application of LCA and Life Cycle Management in business to express the increasingly important role of LCA in guiding and shaping business operations, management practices and strategies.

The conference attracted close to 100 participants from NZ, Australia and five other countries across Europe, Asia and Africa.  The final program can be viewed here: www.lcaconference.org.nz  “The number and high quality of papers submitted was overwhelming,” commented Barbara Nebel, Chair of the Scientific Committee.

Industry and user needs with regard to LCA were a key focus in all presentations. Keynote speakers included Prof. Matthias Finkbeiner (Technical University Berlin), Clare Broadbent (worldsteel), Dave Maslen (NZ Merino) and Dr. Alastair Woodard (Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society).

The conference was organised jointly by the Life Cycle Association New Zealand (LCANZ) and the New Zealand Centre for Life Cycle Management.

Trans-Tasman collaboration on development of an EPD scheme

Life Cycle Association New Zealand (LCANZ) and Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society (ALCAS) are currently working on the development of an Australasian EPD scheme based on the well-established German IBU EPD system.

Global markets increasingly demand science-based, verified and comparable information about the environmental performance of products and services. Environmental Product Declarations, or EPDs, provide a standardized report on the environmental impacts linked to a product or service over its entire life cycle. However, there is currently no standardized internationally-recognised EPD programme in place.

LCANZ and its Australian counterpart, ALCAS, are currently looking to fill this gap for Australasia. The two not-for-profit associations are partnering to investigate the development of an Australasian scheme similar to the well-established European scheme run by the Institute for Construction and Environment (IBU).

Barbara Nebel, President of LCANZ, is excited to work together with ALCAS to establish a cross-Tasman EPD scheme: “It makes most sense for New Zealand and Australia to have one scheme across the Tasman, making it a lot more efficient for companies to develop their EPDs.”

The impetus to examine IBU’s EPD scheme was that 25 European organizations recently signed a MoU to establish a Pan-EU EPD platform. “The European ECO-EPD platform with 17 countries and numerous GBC is the leading one in the world”, says Barbara Nebel, President of LCANZ.

David Baggs, ALCAS President, underlines the goal, “This initiative that the Board of ALCAS and LCANZ are undertaking, it will ensure that all EPDs performed in Australia and New Zealand will be compatible with those in the EU will facilitate the export of Australasian manufactured goods into the EU - the largest single marketplace in the world with a GDP of nearly USD$18 trillion.”

The German EPD scheme, administered by IBU, is a leading force in the ECO-EPD platform and has offered their support to developing an Australasian scheme.