This article is a guest editorial by Nathan Taylor, CEO of Kalypso Designs LLC.
Retailers are in a unique position in the shift to corporate sustainability. On one hand, retailers are the conduit by which brand owners reach consumers with their products and innovations. On the other hand, retailers lack visibility into many of the impacts associated with the design and manufacture of the products they source and sell.
Life cycle analysis (LCA) is often used to drive an effective product sustainability strategy. It facilitates capture of significant short-term benefits, such as reduced costs and an enhanced brand, and a long-term competitive advantage through product innovation.
With up to 90% of the environmental impact of consumer goods occurring before the product even reaches the store, the most effective sustainability improvements are made through targeted innovation efforts that address supply chain stages such as material selection, manufacturing location, and product design.
The most common approach employed in classic LCA involves understanding each of the stages in a product’s lifecycle, from raw material extraction to ultimate use and disposal. For most retailers, however, this isn’t feasible. Unless they also design or specify their own branded products, retailers do not have access to a bill of materials for the products they sell. Furthermore, even if a retailer began to request this type of data from their suppliers, the sheer volume of information to collect and manage would create a non-scalable process which present challenges to employing traditional LCA approaches.
Kalypso Designs has developed a new LCA methodology specifically for retailers. The portfolio LCA provides deep supply chain visibility in a time- and cost-effective manner across the full product portfolio, starting with an overview of product categories, with informed deep dives into areas of particularly high impact.
The portfolio LCA approach enables retailers to identify key hotspots for targeted improvements, assess commodity price risk in the supply chain, empower buyers with better environmental information about their sourcing choices, and quantify trends and achievements in the highest impact areas of the product lifecycle.
Kalypso Designs & The Delphi Group announced their new partnership August 3 to provide retailers with a proprietary life cycle analysis (LCA) service.
Canadian Tire Corporation was the first retailer to apply the service and benefits from the increased understanding of every product’s footprint. “We started using this methodology in 2008 and it has provided us with significant insight into the energy and carbon footprint of our products,” said Tyler Elm, Vice President, Business Sustainability, Canadian Tire Corporation.
