How can a purchasing department make an informed choice regarding the environmental impact of its products? This was the question Dille & Kamille approached Hedgehog Company with. As a pilot, we conducted an LCA study to understand the environmental impact of glass, wood, ceramic, and enamel bowls. In this article, Jonne Gorter, Category Manager, shares her experience regarding this LCA.
Tell us, Jonne, what was the reason to do the LCA study?
“ Dille & Kamille was founded in 1974 by Freek Kamerling, driven by a motivation to approach products differently. Freek worked at a large wholesale businessm where he saw an increase in plastic use, mass production, and cheap, low-quality products entering the market, which he found increasingly distasteful.
As a counter-response, he started Dille & Kamille, focusing on natural materials and timeless products. Therefore, sustainability is truly at the core of our DNA.
We are always looking for the best quality for a particular product, so that it lasts as long as possible. We want people to cook, live, and experience their homes with quality products. That's how we have always viewed sustainability.
However, at the same time, we realise that this approach is no longer sufficient. Certifications and factual checks on what is sustainable are becoming increasingly important. You can also see this evolving from the market; it develops, and more legislation surrounding sustainability emerges.
From my role and within our team, there is a strong desire to know how to make well-informed choices about the materials we purchase. For example, is FSC paper better or is paperwise paper (made from agricultural waste) better? And does a wooden or glass bowl have a bigger footprint?
We were looking for a way to answer such questions. That’s why we initiated a pilot with Hedgehog Company and had an LCA report done on the environmental impact of enamel, ceramic, and glass bowls."
What challenges did you encounter in the LCA Process?
“Dille & Kamille sources from many different suppliers, with whom we often have long and successful relationships. The data needed for the LCA had to be requested from these suppliers. It involved data about the production of a single bowl, but I noticed the suppliers were not yet prepared for that question. They obviously work with large production numbers, and it was very difficult to obtain the level of detail in the data that we needed.
Thus, we were very dependent on the manufacturers and how much knowledge they had of their own designs and processes. The Bill of Material (the "ingredient list" that a product consists of) was not yet a standard item known by every supplier.
For instance, we asked our ceramic supplier to fill in the data sheet, and we received it back with the answer that the product is 100% stoneware. But what does that stoneware consist of? And the dyes used? Those were the answers we wanted to receive.
As a result, we encountered resistance from various suppliers, not out of unwillingness, but more from misunderstanding or lack of knowledge. They are simply not yet accustomed to providing this detailed insight into their own product.
And this surprised me greatly. Our suppliers have many large clients, from whom I would have expected they would also request this data. But this certainly caused a lot of delays in the process.”
How did you deal with these challenges?
"We had to look for another solution. As a result, the project took longer than we had anticipated. However, with some of the suppliers, it simply was not possible to get the data in order. In those cases, Gloria Carta, LCA expert at Hedgehog Company, came up with alternative solutions to complete the calculations. "
Gloria Carta, LCA-expert, explains: “To be able to find relevant results, we modified generic database reference with however much information we got from the suppliers. So for example, from some suppliers we only knew that they are based in China and which type of energy they use. So if they may not know how much energy they use, we could take a generic reference for a ceramic product and modify the energy source to the correct one. This gave a little differentiation between suppliers, reflecting the geography, and sometimes to other extents as well (in the bill of material or energy use).
The plus side of this approach is that you don’t need a lot of information from the suppliers, and you still work with representative data. We did a check between the generic data and the specific data of two of the suppliers, which were able to provide more specific information on the bill of material.
And the result was that the impact from the specific data was lower than the generic data, but the difference was not significant. So we decided that this approach can be very valuable, when materials and products are bought from a variety of sources and therefore, working with primary data was really difficult.”
Can you share some insights from the LCA results?
"This was a good pilot to gauge where we stand in terms of material sustainability. However, the results were surprising and some outcomes were quite disappointing. In some respects, the materials we use turned out not to be necessarily more sustainable than plastic, which was an eye-opener.
For instance, the production of plastic consumes less energy than that of enamel. Enamel turned out to be a material with a significant environmental impact, which I hadn't expected. But it also depends on how you interpret the results; metal might be more polluting in production compared to plastic, but it could be better in terms of raw materials and lifespan.
One truly surprising finding was that transportation has so little impact on the overall environmental footprint of a product. This is because in all other stages, much more impact occurs, and in various categories beyond the well-known CO2 emissions.
I always thought that if it comes from Europe, then it's better. However, when we looked at ceramics, that really didn't hold up. It might, for instance, be a good choice to continue with a certain supplier from China rather than necessarily switching to one closer to the Netherlands, taking into account that we always consider how suppliers perform environmentally and socially.
So in that sense, we definitely learned a lot from the LCA. An LCA makes sustainability “real”; you get the facts instead of lingering in a sort of feeling or assumptions."
