It is very valuable to know your environmental impact early-on, so you can base your strategy on these insights. We spoke to Cyril Stahl, Innovation Advisor University of Gothenburg, with whom we recently performed an LCA for an innovative pigment, made of invasive plants. Read more about it in this article, and find out what kind of insights to expect from an LCA and how you can use these insights.
Can you tell us more about our collaboration?
Cyril Stahl; “So I'm working at the Research and Innovation Services, the office of the University of Gothenburg, and we help researchers, students and employees with different services. In my group, the innovation advisor group, we help early-stage projects to validate and verify specific hypotheses around their research or products.
We have a few types of tools and financing that we got from different stakeholders, including the Innovation Agency of Sweden, and so we help them validate very early on if basically the way they want to move forward is the right way. Think about questions like, is what they want to do legal, is it better for the environment, is it economically feasible?
And with one of the researchers, Helena Hansson, we collaborated with Hedgehog to determine the environmental impact of her product; using invasive plant species to produce pigment for textiles (e.g. wool, linen).”
What were the reasons you wanted to have LCA-results for this specific research?
“There were two or three different questions in parallel. Firstly, we wanted to know if the pigment, made from invasive species, has a lower environmental impact than the status quo, of traditional, existing, pigments.
Also, from a strategy perspective, the researcher had the choice between two different chemicals. Through the LCA, she earned a better understanding of the two options. The LCA helped her to put “numbers” on the different strategies she had. Now she can present different scenarios and actually have real numbers to back them up with.”
What was your reaction to the results? Was there anything surprising?
“I know that you sometimes have this with LCA’s, that the results are completely different from what you think it would be. This can create frustration or misunderstanding. But for this specific product, it was quite close/similar to what we had in mind.
The main result was as we had expected; the innovative pigment has a lower environmental impact than the status quo options. And also regarding the other question the researcher had, about the different chemicals and strategy around this; also there the results were quite clear. The researcher now knows which one is better and what type of improvement can be done.
So we were quite happy with the results in terms of improvement potential and communication to other stakeholders.
The LCA also taught us that there is always some kind of trade-off, and that results are not always black and white. Sometimes we just see emissions, but environmental impact is complex. The life cycle assessment standard presents us the facts that there are many different parameters and impact categories, which are interconnected, and that often it is actually very hard to score better in all different parameters.”
And how was the LCA-process for you?
“Well, we had a few meetings with the researcher and the Hedgehog Team. This went quite smoothly; from the introduction to the ISO standards related to the lifecycle assessment.
And we were especially interested in the start-up LCA, because that's what we wanted; a snapshot at the very beginning, to know what type of red flags there might be. And get clarity that what the researcher is bringing to the table, is the better thing for the environment compared to the status quo.
What also made the process smooth, is the fact that the start-up LCA is a light LCA concept. Because, unfortunately, if you want to do a whole life cycle assessment, it's much more expensive, and it takes much more time, because the needed data and modelling are way more complex.
With the type of data that the researcher already had, in terms of transportation, energy use, and type of chemicals, we could start right away with the start-up LCA.”
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