Skills Used
Lifecycle Assessment (OpenLCA)
Report writing (Environmental Product Declarations, EPDs)
Sustainable product design
Carbon offsetting
Before
EnviroBuild bill themselves as a sustainable building materials company, supplying construction products both direct to individual consumers and to national building contractors. Their main product categories include decking, cladding, and fencing, and the substructure therein.
Before I joined EnviroBuild, their efforts to reduce their environmental impact were minimal, despite being a company that was meant to be putting the environment first. The extent of their credentials was apparently using a high level of recycled material in their products or using recyclable materials, and donating a portion of their profits to a rainforest conservation charity.
Life Cycle Assessments
Before recommendations could be made about what was the best method to reduce their environmental impact (in equal terms of effort, cost, and effectiveness), it was important to understand where exactly their environmental impact was coming from. Once it was known where the environmental impact of the company was coming from, informed and objective decisions could be made about what changes could be made to the products, supply chain, or office etc., and exactly what impact these changes would have on the environment.
I performed LCAs on each of the major product categories by sales, across their entire lifecycle from raw material extraction to disposal. To do this, I worked closely with the suppliers to understand the products’ production process before they arrived at our warehouse, and closely with the team to understand how the products were expected to be installed, used, and ultimately disposed of. I used OpenLCA software with the EcoInvent database to perform the calculations for each product. Concurrently, I worked with a charity to understand our office’s direct emissions, to see how significant those emissions also were.
There are many different ways LCAs can be performed; what’s included, whose impact belongs to who, how the impact of organic products is counted, etc.; so the method I elected to perform all of our product LCAs was following the international Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) standard. An EPD is an official and transparent document, listing a product’s environmental impact across a huge range of impact categories and for each life cycle stage. This is because ultimately as LCAs were performed, we would then seek to verify the results properly with an EPD, which must be externally verified.
Flooring Products
EnviroBuild’s Luxury Vinyl Tile flooring was originally manufactured from entirely virgin PVC (Scenarios 1&4). I undertook an extensive analysis of the product, to try and determine the source of the environmental impact, and how it could be reduced most economically.
In the first stage, manufacturing was converted from the grid electricity in China to renewable wind electricity through the purchase of Green Energy Certificates. This reduced the environmental impact of the 2.5mm flooring by a huge 22.5%, and the 4mm flooring by 27.0%. The cost was only around £0.05 per sqm, barely affecting the cost price of the flooring, enabling it to stay price competitive.
For the second stage, I worked closely with the supplier and test houses to increase the recycled material content without compromising on performance. The 2.5mm flooring ended up using 45% recycled PVC in its formulation, and the 4mm flooring used 100% recycled, for no extra cost. Ultimately, this reduced the impact of the 2.5mm flooring by 55.0%, and the 4mm flooring by 60.0%. At its time of release in January 2022, Sisu LVT flooring was the most sustainable on the market.
Composite Products
The first product we focused on reducing the environmental impact of was our composite products, which made up ~54% of our product sales by revenue. It was found that ~34% of the product’s Global Warming Potential (a way of measuring the carbon footprint of a product, including all green-house gas emissions weighted according to their contribution to global warming across 100 years, measured relative to CO2 in kgCO2e) was in the manufacture of the product.
Therefore I made the recommendation to switch this manufacture from using grid electricity, which in China is very dependent on environmentally unfriendly fuels such as coal, to entirely using wind energy. This had the effect of reducing the environmental impact by ~33% (as measured by GWP), for a cost increase of only £4 per tonne of material.
The corresponding EPD that was published alongside the reduction in environmental impact was the first EPD to be published in the UK for composite products.
Total Environmental Impact
Through making informed and measurable changes to our products across 2021, I added together the environmental impact of each of our products (mostly as calculated in my own LCAs) and our company’s emissions to see what impact the changes we’d made had on the company as a whole. I found that through making changes to various products to make them more sustainable, we’d manage to reduce our company emissions by ~12% between 2020 and 2021, a figure equivalent to a massive 1,421 tCO2e. This equivalent to the amount of CO2 absorbed by 65,000 trees in a year, the amount of trees in almost 72 acres of dense forest.