Life Cycle Thinking Blog

Very useful guide on how to go about engaging your employees into sustainability and watch the culture change: Toward Engagement 2.0
While these case studies are from companies who “get” sustainability, there are some good suggestions for how to develop sustainability-think for all employees and yield real value for any company at any stage. Lots of resources, too.

Interesting presentation by Bresseler company in how they do quick versions of life cycle analysis in an iterative process in doing product design: http://www.bresslergroup.com/webinar/cut-the-crap/video.php
I don’t know the company, but I like their way of thinking.

Obama postponed the revision to the ozone standard today. It’s the right move for now.
Everyone wants clean air. The questions are how much it costs and who pays? We have a convoluted accretion of decades-long regulatory mechanisms that have very high costs to companies in pollution control and compliance (that require resource reallocation away from income-generating production) and high costs to state governments (i.e., state taxpayers) to implement ozone control programs. Postponement while we work our way through this recession is realistic.

The American Chemistry Society has launched it’s new website on sustainability: www.acs.org/sustainability.
Yours truly led development of the site as a portal for those interested in chemistry and sustainability and, in particular, to learn what the American Chemical Society and its members are doing and can do to understand and create chemical solutions sustainably.

Note the federal government new hires to write and support new regulations in the last year and a half. Unfortunately, notice how all the states have to implement these new regulations and the thousands of companies who have to comply aren’t keeping up. Maybe because the latter aren’t able to print money to hire new people (or consultants). They have to reallocate resources to meet these new requirements. Hopefully, employees and dollars are being pulled from less beneficial activities…..

I agree with the article by Mark McElroy “Do LCAs Measure Up To Sustainability?” He says they do not, because they are too narrowly focused on eco-efficiency only and ignore context.
As I’ve blogged before, sustainability should be about how we do what we do and not a collation of LCA’s. At best LCA’s help inform decisions as we try to understand the dynamic systems of which products and users are a part. I use the phrase “life cycle thinking” to describe how we need to recognize the potential intended and unintended consequences of our actions. Understanding contexts and consequences.