Life Cycle Assessments

My training and education as an industrial engineer taught me to be a systems thinker, i.e., someone who can see the whole and the parts and how they work together. In my opinion, this is a fundamental skill for effective management. At a minimum, for my classes, I teach that:

* a system is a purposeful collection of components,
* a business system can transcend organizational boundaries,
* a system's environment consists of factors outside its control but can affect its operation, and
* good management systems have measured and actionable feedback loops.

One of the reasons it is important have a systems perspective is to understand how changes in one part of the system can affect the other. Optimizing one part of the system may be suboptimal for the system as a whole.

This comes to mind because I have been reading Daniel Goleman's Ecological Intelligence. Understanding the environmental and social impact of products we produce and purchase extends the system perspective to include the dimension of time. He describes life cycle assessment (LCA) as "a method that allows us to systematically tear apart any manufactured item into its components and their subsidiary industrial processes, and measure with near-surgical precision their impact on nature from the beginning of their production through their final disposal" (p. 14). The complexity is staggering.

One example he gives is glass packaging (pp. 18): "The basics for making glass have changed little since the time of ancient Rome. Today, natural gas-powered furnances... melt sand into glass... But there's far more to it than that. A chart showing the thirteen most important processes deployed to make glass jars revealed a system stitching together 1,959 distinct "unit processes." Each unit process... represents an aggregate of innumerable subsidiary processes, themselves the outcome of hundred of others, in what can appear an infinite regression."

Producing a glass jar requires the use of hundreds of substances (and 659 different ingredients) throughout the jar's supply chain. According to Goleman (p. 18), around one hundred substances [are] released into water and fifty or so into soil along the way... [with] 220 different kinds of emissions into the air." In addition to these ecological concerns, the LCA examines the energy use and health risks, such as carcinogens, in the product and its various unit processes. Incorporating recycled glass saves hundreds of gallons of water and mitigates carbon dioxide emissions, so the LCA incorporates negative as well as positive effects.

Increasingly, consumers and environmental advocates are pressing manufacturers to disclose such information. With the Internet and social networking tools, it is easy to build a groundswell of support for -- or against -- a particular product for its impact. Independent information providers, also known as "infomediaries," are compiling this vast array of information and developing summarized and simplified indices. Manufacturers and retailers are gradually recognizing the need to be more transparent. The NYTimes published an interesting article describing this trend earlier this summer.

I find this trend to be heartening, yet overwhelming at the same time. I'm still not sure if "paper or plastic?" is the best option when I don't have my reusable grocery bags. Or what kind of light bulb I should buy. Flourescent bulbs use less energy to illuminate, but if you consider the production process and hazardous materials, are florescent better than incandescent bulbs?

I don't know -- I guess I'll sit in the dark and think about it.