Not Grumbling About Life-Cycle Assessment

Based on some of the audience Q&A I think that much of the audience left grumbling after Thursday's session, "Demystifying Sustainability: A Life-Cycle Perspective," convened by the energetic Meredith Elbaum of Sasaki, with Stanley Rhodes of Scientific Certification Systems speaking along with Nancy Harrod of Sasaki and Melissa Vernon of InterfaceFlor. I put Stanley's name first because I think he was the source of the grumbling. At a conference where "Was the session inspiring?" is one of the questions asked by the educational session evaluation form, Stanley made pointed criticisms of LEED and registered alarm about consequences of carbon emissions, like oceanic acidification (he polled the audience on its awareness of this issue—which was lacking, so here's a great LA Times article on the issue). But I found Stanley's presentation exciting. He recommended the use of Environmental Performance Declarations, which have been compared to a "nutrition facts" label for building materials, buildings, electricity, or any other product with an environmental impact. Just as the nutrition facts label analyzes the nutrition of a food item, so could similar labels list impacts in numerous categories in a product's life cycle, such as greenhouse gas emissions, human health impacts, cost, durability, disposal issues, etc. Here's an example of an actual carpet sample.

Stanley argued that life-cycle assessment is the best way to comprehensively understand a product's environmental performance. (For more on this topic check out the EBN feature Life-Cycle Assessment for Buildings: Seeking the Holy Grail.) I've been skeptical of this approach because it takes considerable time and expertise to understand the results of such an analysis. But Stanley introduced a variation on the nutrition facts label that shows at a glance, with a color coded bar chart, how a product stacks up against others in the same category. In this way the comparison to the nutrition label is not a good one, because that label does not offer an instant comparison (and the nutritional data isn't suited to it). Life-cycle assessment can reveal bad news (leaving people grumbling) but we need to know the true impacts of products in order to reduce them. Look for more on understanding green product certifications and the role of life-cycle assessment in the next EBN.