Call for participation: "LCA to go" consortium formed to boost Life Cycle Assessment use in European SMEs

5th January 2010

Ecodesign Centre (Wales/UK)

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the leading internationally recognised approach for improving the environmental performance of products. Crucially SMEs, the majority of manufacturing companies in Europe, face significant barriers in implementing LCA.

Following an FP7 environment call in Summer 2009 a consortium, led by the Fraunhofer Institute, was formed to tackle the challenge of boosting LCA use in European SMEs: LCA knowledge should be made conveniently accessible to SMEs, just served without much ado like a “Coffee to go”, making “LCA to go” the obvious vision and title of the proposal. "LCA to go" partners include the Ecodesign Centre, TU Delft, TU Vienna, Sirris and Valsay amongst others.

“LCA to go” proposes to develop innovative sectoral methods and tools for highly innovative “Green Industries” such as bio-based plastics, industrial machinery, electronics, renewable energy, sensors and smart textiles. “The current trend to go for Carbon Footprints is a perfect door-opener for LCA usage in SMEs, making this approach a cornerstone of the project”, as Karsten Schischke, Fraunhofer IZM, explains: “We currently see a huge interest among large companies in the IT business to get involved in Product Carbon Footprints and this wave is likely to reach SMEs within the next 1-2 years. But if science does not provide the right tools for them now, they will not be able to face this challenge and to turn it into a competitive advantage.”

Free web-tools will serve dedicated needs of the target sectors addressing the specifics of the technologies and implementing parameterised models and lean assessments. As full-scale LCAs are just not suitable for the requirements of SMEs Prof. Wolgang Wimmer of TU Vienna points out: “For the daily business of an SME it is fully sufficient to be ‘approximately right and not totally wrong’ with any environmental assessment.” Full scale LCAs are for large companies and robust policy making, but SMEs need dedicated solutions for well defined needs-to-know. Just as Apple boosted a new market with their idea of small “apps”, SMEs need easy-to-understand tools, which deliver unambiguous results within minutes. The needs driven approach of “LCA to go” includes a mentoring programme for 100 SMEs. Karsten Schischke, who was project manager of the broad 2005 EU EcoDesign Awareness Raising Campaign, explains: “SMEs want to see before they believe, that’s why it is so important to deliver a critical mass of success stories from the field. On environmental matters SMEs rarely want to be pioneers, but they easily follow, if others showcase their achievements transparently.”

The “LCA to go” project will:
• greatly increase the availability and implementation of LCA in European SMEs. The web-tools developed by “LCA to go” will be free to use by all SMEs
• boost business-to-business communication
• significantly improve the environmental performance of SMEs' products and contributing to European SMEs' competitiveness.
• support the implementation of EU initiatives such as the Sustainable and Consumption Action Plan

61 SMEs have already signalled their interest to work with the consortium. Any other SMEs (from these sectors) interested in getting involved should contact the Ecodesign Centre (info@edcw.org) or the Fraunhofer Institute (ecodesignarc@izm.fraunhofer.de) for further information.