Environmental Tools & Ideas for Government, Corporations and Non-Governmental Organizations in Renewing the Environmental Agenda: Part I: Life Cycle Assessment

Advancing a pro-environmental agenda seems like an uphill climb these days. So many seem dis-interested in environmental matters except for media sound bites and I was curious why this is the case? I certainly know of many people in my community doing so much for the environment. That being said, I know many more who are doing nothing, know the sound bites regarding issues and nothing more. One core problem is the public attention is continuously shifting towards consumption  and corporate necessities. People are simply engaging with big business and not engaging with nature or our surrounding world. And then there is politics, which I am always taken aback by extraordinary venting about big government, but rarely hear people venting about big business. Big business is or has been depending on whom you speak to taking over government in many ways, from the communities selling rights to their parking meters, highways and water supplies to the many government technical boards that are filled with industry executives and experts. I believe it is fair to say that big business is dictating policy and big business is mostly concerned with profits, bottom line profits for shareholders and other investors and not the commons of Americans. In this model, advancing a pro-environmental agenda will always be challenging.

So how can the environmental movement impact big business? I think this is a question that has begun to be answered in certain non-governemntal organizations creating programs for engaging business. One brief example is The Center for Market Innovation at the National Resource Defense Center (NRDC) which has successfully partnered with real estate firms to foster a green and sustainable approach to development and office space build outs. The iconic Empire State Building is just one case study of an existing building making the choice for a more green future by installing over 6,500 new windows that cut down energy bills and CO2 emissions among other changes in a major retrofit that supports the environmental agenda. This is a model of a private/public/NGO partnership that worked and was a great success offers a light on a new path. Details of this case study and others is at the following link; http://www.nrdc.org/greenbusiness/empire-state-building-windows.asp.

When partnerships are based on sound policy and empathic communication, change with the environment in the calculus of the solution is possible and in the process can change big corporations. Good policy is based on sound scientific experiment and data, whether it be quantitative or qualitative. Without science, policy will be too swayed by politics. The war on science from certain elements of the political world and political stagnation is just creating bad policy and does subsequently have an incalculable impact on the environment. Good policy should answer questions, provide solutions and political different ideologies together. There is caution to be included in this private/public/NGO partnership. Not every National Park can be boiled down to an advertising  plan for the corporation, nor can protection of wildlife be brought to you by the Exxon Mobil. These corporation have a responsibility to the commons as well and efforts shouldn't be broken down to an advertising metric and profits. These corporations have a responsibility to Government and the commons we share.

One such policy the Environmental Protection Agency wrote regarding Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and related principles and practice might be one solution that both environmentalists and corporations could use. This policy is a natural next step from the original Recycle, Reuse, and Reduce dictum and logo that is ubiquitous in our culture and on many of the products we buy. Some often add Recover as part of this dictum and believe LCA is the next step in reviving and renewing Recycle, Reduce, and Reuse, rather than abandon it for expanded consumption and investment as some might offer. The Reduce and Reuse portions of this dictum never really took hold and because of that, more investment in the EPA Risk Management office could open new doors for private/public/NGO partnerships. A simple schematic of the framework of LCA is below.

Life Cycle Assessment is a "cradle to grave" approach for assessing industrial systems. Cradle to Grave begins with the gathering of raw materials from the earth to create a product and ends at that point when all materials are returned to the earth. Life Cycle Assessment evaluates all stages of a product's life from the perspective that they are interdependent, that one operation leads to the next. LCA generates all the cumulative environmental impacts from all stages of the life cycle, often including environmental impacts not considered in more traditional analyses. By including these impacts throughout the product life cycle, LCA provides a comprehensive view of the environmental aspects of the product or process and a more accurate picture of the true environmental trade-offs in product and process selection (EPA, 2006). This type of analyses could and often does include non-traditional impacts to social systems and captures economic impacts to communities where the extraction occurs. In doing this, LCA places real values on raw materials extraction that go beyond what commodities markets normally trade.

A more widespread implementation of LCA might foster a renewed zeal for invention, new business opportunities, and profits, but most important of all it will allow corporations to develop a deeper responsibility to the earth and its resources, the life supporting system for all. In 2002, WNYC reported that 40% of the garbage that New York City residents separated for recycling actually ended up in landfills (WNYC, 2002) New York City has reconstituted its recycling program with a new 20 year deal with Sims Metals, a metals recycling company and re-organized the program, but more work is still to be done. You can see how your NYC neighborhood does with recycling here; http://gis.nyc.gov/ops/mmr/address.jsp?app=MMR. The statistics for my neighborhood were grim and there is allot more to do, so there is much work to do in renewing our efforts to Recycle, Reduce, Reuse, and Recover.

Expecting, or dreaming in my case, that a more robust government will start to fund the EPA's Risk Management Office to promote LCA more than has been done, or expecting corporations to do this on their own is just not in the plans during this financial crisis this Country is facing. Politically speaking, its simply a dream that government would play a larger role in these efforts with corporations holding such a huge amount of power in our politics and policy making arenas. Environmentalists will have to cautiously engage in private/public partnerships to have positive environmental impacts until a paradigm shift occurs and the US government is not so feckless in light of the rise of corporations in the US.

References:
1 - Life Cycle Assessment: Principles and Practice., Scientific Applications International Corporation & National Risk Management Research Laboratory: Office of Research and Development, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, Ohio. May 2006.

2 - City Council Holds Hearings on Saving Recycling, WNYC, April 18, 2002

3 - http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2008/dec/18/20-year-deal-may-prevent-recycling-cuts/

4 - Life Cycle Assessment Framework - http://www.setac.org/