Sustainability – across the entire life cycle
Most products have multiple environmental impacts throughout their life cycle and throughout the value chain. It’s therefore important to know what these impacts are. We can use this knowledge to improve product sustainability – from raw material to waste material.
Life cycle assessments
Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) reveal the environmental performance of products during and beyond their life cycle. They can also be used to compare the eco-performances of different products in the same application. As such, they are an important tool in validating the ECO+ scores of our products. They also help us identify ways to minimize our products’ eco-footprints.
The awareness of a product’s total eco-effect stimulates us to develop new products with a lower eco-impact. It also helps us improve performance. For instance, we can use less fossil fuel during production, or reduce losses in the production process, and we can recycle products when they reach the waste stage. At the same time, we can increase a product’s usability lifetime and reduce its energy consumption.
Our approach also focuses on biodiversity. We look carefully at the use of water, energy, land and raw materials. Take water-intensive processes: our drive is to make them more efficient. A good example is our wine stabilizer Claristar® that can reduce water usage in the wine industry by 25 to 50%.
Meeting accepted standards
At DSM, adherence to environmental standards doesn’t mean ticking boxes. To support our footprint information and our ECO+ reporting, we carry out LCAs according to standards that are accepted industry-wide, including the ISO 14040/14044 methodology. We also use our highly developed external network to enhance industry consensus on LCA practices.
Creating transparency
Our goal is to carry out LCAs for all of our products, from the extraction of raw materials until the moment the product leaves the factory gate. At year-end 2010 we determined the ‘cradle to gate’ footprint (that is, from the extraction of raw materials until the moment the product leaves the DSM factory gate) for some 82% of our products. Together these are responsible for over 80% of our greenhouse-gas emissions. In addition, for all new products we carry out full LCAs, including the use and waste stages, in other words ‘from cradle to grave’.. We provide our customers with access to the outcomes of these assessments so that they can carry out LCAs for their own products. In this way, we contribute to the eco-transparency of the overall value chain.
