Understanding Sustainable Product Innovation
Sustainable Product Innovation (SPI) enables product development teams to utilize life cycle thinking to optimize and reduce the impacts of products. Sustainable Solutions Corporation’s (SSC) proven process integrates SPI tools into a company’s stage-gate or new product development process to help our clients consider alternative materials, processing sourcing, and other aspects to reduce the life cycle impacts of a product.
LCA Process and Model for Life Cycle Thinking
SSC offers two essential services to optimize your products and decrease your embodied carbon. These services are Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and SPI. LCA is the basis for your SPI program and the key to helping your new product development team reduce the environmental impacts of your products.
Understanding your product’s embodied carbon is done by conducting an LCA to identify the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of a product or process. GWP represents the total of all the GHG emissions in each phase of the product's life cycle. The LCA provides key information on where to focus your SPI activities, however, SSC’s SPI process goes deeper to provide other sustainable attributes including carbon reduction.
Once an organization understands the environmental impacts of the raw material and manufacturing stages for their product, they can develop an SPI process to reduce the embodied carbon in both stages.
Using LCA to Create More Sustainable Products
This graph illustrates an example of optimization and the power of SPI in using LCA to understand impact reductions from products and operational changes. The green line shows the impact reduction from the baseline.
Educational Series: Achieve Your Decarbonization Goals with LCA and PCF
“THESE WEBINARS WERE AN EXCELLENT USE OF TIME AND I WOULD NOT HESITATE TO SIGN UP FOR MORE.”
A comprehensive three-part educational course that teaches you the fundamentals of Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) and Product Carbon Footprints (PCF).
Why Choose SSC?
SSC leverages over 23 years of experience focused solely on sustainability to provide businesses the services and tools they need to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and minimize their environmental impact. We have perfected a system that is designed for maximum return on investment and has helped hundreds of clients improve their bottom line and reduce environmental impacts.
SSC is proud to support some of the world’s most sustainable companies by being their go-to partner for holistic sustainability strategies and individual initiatives throughout these programs.
Resources
Key Terms & definitions
Podcast epidsode
How To Revolutionize Your New Product Development Process
Definitions of key terms and acronyms.
