BIOMASS HUB

In Green to Gold, authors Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston write:

An environmental lens is not just a nice strategy tool or a feel-good digression from the real work of a company.  It’s an essential element of business strategy in the modern world.  It provides a way for businesses to contend with the real problems of pollution and natural resource management.

More recently, life cycle assessments (LCA) have emerged as a way to quantify the human and environmental impacts of products from raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, maintenance, recycling, and end-of-life.  In the world of biomass, it means everything.

Take the EPA’s RFS2, which introduced the first ever mandated GHG accounting system for biofuels.  Along with emerging low carbon fuel standards (see LCFS), renewable energy firms are increasingly incorporating LCA calculations into their analysis.  As such, LCA is rapidly become a key indicator of success in meeting corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments within large multinationals.  LCA forms the backbone of emerging sustainability standards.  After all, what’s the point of utilizing biomass resources if it exacerbates climate challenges?

Although energy is a ubiquitous good in our society, customers still want to know a company is making progress in environmental areas, even if their immediate view is limited to the end product dispensed by power lines or gas pumps.  Recent efforts by oil majors to improve their public image (see BP and Chevron) demonstrate this point:

In Life Cycle Thinking: Key Issues and Indespensible Tools, Lloyd Hicks provides a useful analysis of the growing importance of LCAs to consumers.  He references Melissa Hamilton of EarthShift, an organization focused on LCA capacity building within corporations, who talked about the different methodologies used in LCA and results that often surprise clients:

According to Hamilton, companies that create products from biomass-based crops often think their products are naturally better than the petrochemical-based alternatives, but discover the impacts from intensive land use, fertilizer use, and pesticide application are much higher than expected. This depends on the resources used in growing those plants, and LCA can help identify critical areas to focus on during the production of these products.

She also points out that there is variability produced by the impact methodologies within LCA. These are consensus-based approaches decided upon by life cycle practitioners and scientists that convert emissions into human and environmental impacts.  There are many to choose from, but each yields different results depending on value choices and the emissions measured.  It is important for companies to select one that is relevant for the product studied, and to compare results across methods.  Treatment of biomass-based crops might produce either favorable or unfavorable results for a product depending on the selected methodology, for example.

With growing emphasis on quantifying GHG profiles of biomass-based products and related sustainability standards, companies are under an increasing obligation to report the environmental and social impacts of their products.  While emerging sustainability standards are not legally actionable or mandatory, increasing demand for accountability from consumers is exposing companies to increased scrutiny.

Image: Flickr/Mathieu Struck