Abstract
Environmental impacts of human activities, heightened consumer concern over the food they eat, and business survival hinging on increasing performance mean there is pressure from all sides to reduce product environmental impacts—a strategic challenge to help keep businesses in business and improve competitiveness. Conscious of this challenge, the oilcrop commodity chain wanted to provide vegetable oil producers and users with a tool for assessing the environmental impacts of vegetable oil-based foods. The tool is called ACéVOIL, and can be used to validate the environmental value benefit of ecodesign initiatives as-deployed or as-designed. ACéVOIL accounts for every stage in the end-to-end commodity production and distribution process, making it possible to control and contain any pollution transfers between two distinct environmental impacts or two lifecycle stages. The tool also outputs results that can be readily communicated out to clients and/or consumers as part of a product information backbone to differentiate from competitor products and up-value the ecodesign initiatives implemented. However, communicating LCA results out to the general public can prove tricky business, so the exercise needs to be managed with care and forethought. Several upgrades are envisioned to extend the scope of ACéVOIL out to biomass-based products made from pure or processed vegetable oils.
Highlights
The all-too-visible environmental impacts of human activity—resource depletion, habitat destruction, pollutant emissions—have reached such a point that it is imperative to factor the environment into everything we do
Environmental impacts of human activities, heightened consumer concern over the food they eat, and business survival hinging on increasing performance mean there is pressure from all sides to reduce product environmental impacts—a strategic challenge to help keep businesses in business and improve competitiveness
The tool outputs results that can be readily communicated out to clients and/or consumers as part of a product information backbone to differentiate from competitor products and up-value the ecodesign initiatives implemented
Summary
The all-too-visible environmental impacts of human activity—resource depletion, habitat destruction, pollutant emissions—have reached such a point that it is imperative to factor the environment into everything we do. Over and above moving to help reduce the environmental footprint and improve the brand image of its product, integrating environmental sustainability performance right from the product conception, design and development phase should be seen as an opportunity than a regulatory and/or societal constraint This is because the adoption of ecodesign principles generally fosters product innovation and reduces production costs (by reducing energy consumption, using natural resources and inputs, etc.), which enhances performance. To meet these objectives of reducing environment impacts, communicating environmental information out to consumers and increasing performance, industry players need an in-depth picture of the environmental impacts of their products in order to work on reducing them and leverage the value of the ecodesign efforts engaged, and differentiate from any competitor products. We report the approaches implemented in the vegetable oil production sector and detail the environmental effect assessment tool ACéVOIL and its applications, as well as the difficulties tied to mobilizing value in the results of an environmental benefit assessment
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