Kalypso Designs and The Delphi Group have formed a new partnership to provide retailers with a proprietary life cycle analysis (LCA) service that offers clients significant insights into their products and supply chain from a top-down perspective in a fraction of the time and cost. This intelligence can drive effective sustainability strategies, leading to significant short-term benefits such as reduced costs and enhanced branding, along with improved long-term competitive advantage.
“We are very excited about our strategic alliance with Kalypso”, said Mike Gerbis, CEO of The Delphi Group. “Delphi is increasingly being asked by our Fortune 500 customers to assess product and supply chain footprints. The partnership with Kalypso now allows us to provide a more robust and cost-effective solution that will enhance our customers’ ability to make better informed decisions.”
Retailers have struggled with the challenges of performing LCA on their products for some time. A product-by-product LCA process can take years in retail environments, where there may be thousands of different products. Nathan Taylor of Kalypso Designs has been developing a hybrid LCA methodology which combines the strengths of both top-down economic (EIO-LCA) and bottom-up process LCA into a single model built specifically for retailers. Through the partnership with the Delphi Group, the two firms are now able to offer a scalable and efficient process to analyze the relative environmental impacts, such as carbon footprint and embedded energy, of all the product types in a retailer's portfolio. This 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.
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 tool 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. “The partnership between Delphi and Kalypso, two long-term reliable suppliers, allows us to advance our work in quantifying the embedded energy and carbon in the products we sell.”
One of the greatest advantages of the hybrid approach is that customers can use data that they are already collecting, thereby avoiding a cumbersome and costly supply chain data acquisition effort.
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