Life cycle assessment is the most comprehensive and widely used tool used to evaluate environmental and economic impacts of products and services throughout the life cycle – from raw materials acquisition and processing, manufacturing and packaging, distribution, use, reuse if feasible, and end-of-life management.
Currently, companies, procurement professionals, regulators, and investors are reliant on a life cycle industry with datasets still in development. Too often firms rely on environmental impact studies for their greenhouse gas emissions reports that are built on secondary information, such as industry averages. The results are imprecise, highly variable (+/- 400 to 1,000%) and and inappropriate for environmental impact statements.
The Environmental Genome’s database provides the most transparent, actionable, and accurate (+/- 10 to 20%) estimates available. It enables and provides the means for Scope 3 reporting of the indirect emissions of a company’s suppliers and others in the upstream and downstream activities in its supply chain that investors, regulators, and other stakeholders want.
The quality of the data is important because all of our manufactured products have environmental impacts. We must understand those impacts in order to make the critical choices that will allow us to improve our environment.