How can you improve your CSR strategy with LCA?

What are the challenges involved in implementing a sound CSR strategy?

Preparing and deploying a concrete CSR strategy with a multi-year roadmap is a major challenge. It requires the articulation of numerous actions, such as training management and operational teams, brainstorming, implementing concrete actions for employees and for the business, working with the ecosystem, etc.

These are subjects that are :

• difficult to push internally, as they are perceived as extra work for employees who don't necessarily understand the impact of their actions.
• difficult to implement, as it is necessary to involve the entire value chain in the impact reduction process
• are difficult to promote, as it is never easy to communicate on the CSR actions implemented: About what? At what level? To whom? How to avoid greenwashing? Which certifications to use?
• difficult to prioritize if the impact is not quantified in relation to the investment cost.

Life Cycle Assessment (L CA) can help overcome these obstacles, whether internal or external. We'll see how in the rest of this article, focusing on the textile and furniture manufacturers and brands we know best.

LCA, a steering tool for your CSR strategy

Corporate CSR strategy is a vast and complex subject, and few of today's strategies are based on LCA. Yet LCA provides an extremely solid foundation for any CSR strategy, since its main virtue is to enable a controlled and quantified approach to CSR.

💡 In fact, it's one of the only approaches that enables us to effectively manage our impact internally, notably by quantifying the impact of our actions, and to communicate our efforts in an impactful way.

Indeed, what better way to steer your CSR strategy than with environmental information?

At the product level, a high level of granularity allows :

• talk to designers with product-level information
• talk to product managers, gathering data by collection, for example
• talk to buyers, gathering information by production basin

Which allows us to get as close as possible to the functioning of a classic company management strategy:

• By creating quantified environmental data and KPIs
• By enabling information to be fed back down to the decision-making centers to push or justify budgets by Business Units.

Which translates into a single quantified datum all the efforts made in terms of traceability, recyclability, reparability, certifications, sustainability, etc.

Gives a complete picture of the company's environmental impact: CSR strategy is often driven by greenhouse gas emissions. But we mustn't forget that there are other impacts on the environment, such as water pollution and the impact on biodiversity.

It's also a methodology that allows you to make the most of your efforts by :

• Communicate on the environmental impact of your products
• Communicate its impact in accordance with scientific standards and regulations
• Access to numerous certifications such as Bcorp, ISO 9001, etc.
• Get your ecosystem on board with clear, quantified explanations of your requests.

💡 Piloting its impact is the best way to avoid greenwashing and avoid unintentionally communicating false or very low-impact information.

When should you use LCA as part of your CSR strategy?

For any strategy, it's important to have a steering tool! No one would implement a cost-cutting policy without first measuring and steering it. But that's exactly what happens when you want to reduce your environmental impact.

LCA is often perceived as complex, and is often an afterthought. And yet, LCA makes perfect sense as a steering tool when used at different stages of a CSR strategy:

• In a diagnostic phase: LCA has a strong educational virtue, as it forces us to reappropriate and understand our entire production chain and its associated impacts.
• Following a carbon audit: a carbon audit often serves as an initial environmental diagnosis, but remains limited to the company level. To refine the analysis, for example by collection or at product level, it is interesting to look at LCA. Note that the work done on the carbon footprint is a good first step towards LCA, see our article: LCA or carbon footprint?
• In a CSR strategy management phase:
• by pooling the results and data from several LCAs, it is possible to obtain quantified environmental information for each player, from product design to marketing.
• implementing an eco-design strategy based on LCA results, and identifying areas for improvement for each player in the value chain.

• In a phase of feedback and communication on its CSR strategy. For example, to include examples of "environmental product sheets" in your extra-financial reporting, or to communicate the impact of your products to your customers and consumers. Your communication will be all the more powerful if it is justified and has a global vision.

💡 The little +: A phase of reworking data models is a golden opportunity to gain a competitive edge, as the effectiveness of LCA rests largely on the ability to collect product data quickly.

Limits

While LCA offers opportunities for managing the environmental aspects of a CSR strategy, it does have several limitations.

In fact, it's a :

• More cumbersome and slower, though more complete, than a carbon balance sheet
• Involves numerous internal parties (purchasing, product managers, designers, marketing) or external parties (suppliers)
• Which adds extra work to what are often already busy schedules for its teams
• Requires data-processing capabilities for analysis at levels higher than the product level (collections, etc.).

Even if the benefits of LCA are recognized by many, these limitations mean that it is not used to its full potential. However, we are convinced that LCA can enable companies to effectively manage their CSR strategy.

With Waro, we want to remove the operational barriers to exploiting LCA to its full potential by enabling :

• Reduce the time spent on each LCA: the more LCAs you do, the faster you'll be able to do the next ones.
• Automate data collection from all types of data sources
• Integrate with existing operational systems (ERP, PIM, PLM) to avoid duplication of user effort
• Collaborate with internal teams and suppliers.
• Bring environmental information up to the desired level with intuitive, hard-hitting dashboards

To find out more about Waro and how we enable companies to integrate LCA into their CSR strategy (and much more besides) you can visit our website here or make an appointment.

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