Blog Archive
Subscribe in a reader

GHG accounting spreads to consumer goods

Posted: January 25, 2010 at 12:44 PM CST

The life cycle analysis concept appears to be spreading. A report emerged this week that 60 corporations have volunteering to measure the full lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of consumer products from blue jeans to manufactured steel. The World Resources Institute, which developed the standards along with the World business Council for Sustainable Development, reported they were encouraged by more than 120 applications to road test the new standards.

There are some big names in the list of those willing to calculate their GHG emissions throughout the supply chain: 3M Co., Airbus, BASF, DuPont, Ford Motor, General Electric, Kraft Foods, Levi Strauss, Mitsubishi chemical Corp., Procter & Gamble, Shell, among others.

Biofuels soon won’t be alone in meeting the challenge to figure out what needs to included and not included in GHG assessments. Will the critics of other business sectors jump in to expand the equation, in the way ethanol’s critics have successfully incorporated the international indirect land use question into the global debate?

One other development in the growing maze of sustainability schemes: The ISO is forming a committee to develop an international standard on sustainability. It will take at least three years, they predict, to come up with an ISO standard. I doubt an ISO standard will lay the controversies to rest, however. Sustainability has become the favorite vehicle for a number of environmental and social NGOs to hang their cause on. Sustainability is a much broader, more amorphous word than GHG lifecycle analysis. Just the word alone invites expansion. Human rights groups have jumped on the bandwagon of sustainability in developing countries’ sustainable biofuels schemes, trying to find a way to make palm oil corporations, for example, more accountable for their labor policies and actions affecting indigenous peoples. The industry needs to keep a close eye on the development of sustainability schemes, to be sure they evolving criteria continue to make sense for all.

-Susanne Retka Schill