Environmental Genome Initiative Advisory Services

EGI has provided sustainability advisory services to some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Ascension among them; chemical and consumer goods manufacturers such as Dupont, BASF and GE; agriculture, energy, renewable energy, and recycling firms; as well as governments, academic institutions, foundations, and industry associations.

We’ve advised more than 100 organizations on sustainability and circularity projects, including many public companies that are facing increased demands from regulators, investors, and customers for climate risk and emissions reporting.

Sustainability planning often starts with a quantitative analysis tool, the life cycle inventory (LCI), that accounts for the input and output flows of raw materials, water, energy, emissions, and other discharges from a product or service “system.” A life cycle assessment (LCA) will then use these data to assess the environmental benefits and negative impacts throughout the life cycle – from raw materials acquisition and processing, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, use, reuse if feasible, to end-of-life management. It can also be extended to an economic life cycle assessment.

We are often engaged to help with common but difficult challenges such as:

• Reviewing and improving life cycle inventory data that are incomplete, compiled from unknown origins or with assumptions that are not clear, or otherwise lacking the detail necessary to be verifiable, actionable, and credible.
• Pinpointing the most important operational factors that are causing negative environmental and financial  impacts, such as the overconsumption of energy, water, or other wastes. We’ll also help to shape a sustainability action plan to improve results such as product reformulation, equipment redesign, process modification, waste minimization, or recycling initiatives.
• Measuring emissions in complex supply chains, within and beyond an organization’s direct control (Scopes 1, 2 and 3), establishing realistic quantitative goals, and an ongoing monitoring system.
• Assessing environmental impacts during the product design stage,  when most of the product-related environmental impacts are determined.
• Scenario analysis to examine the ways in which scaling sustainability initiatives or changing assumptions will influence operations and benefit the environment.

In addition, our work supports comparative LCAs, used to compare two or more types of products with competitive assertions and other marketing claims; single-issue LCAs such as Carbon Footprint, Water Footprint and Solid Waste reports, Hotspot Analysis, Economic Impact, and Environmental Product Declarations; as well as independent reviews of internal or third-party LCA study design or results.