Tuesday, April 26, 2011 by Tim Greiner

An exciting new vehicle for enhancing the overall value and communication of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results and opportunities is the integration of GIS and mapping functionality into LCA tools.

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Sourcemap of New Leaf Paper sold at Office Depot from treehugger.com 

Mapping tools can help LCA results come alive for your audience and provide business value by shedding light on topics such as:

• Carrying capacity: Comparing resource consumption with local resource availability (e.g. Is your manufacturing facility consuming water in a water scarce area?).

• Assimilative capacity: Examining how wastes and emissions are absorbed at the local level. Are different regional characterization factors appropriate (e.g. is acidification a higher concern for your facility in Ohio than Shenzhen?)?

• Sourcing: Depicting how different suppliers, shipping modes, warehouse locations, and distances impact a product’s carbon footprint.

• People: Mapping material flows can connect us to the people that provide a product’s raw materials and illuminate social challenges deep in the supply chain.

• Social Media: Connecting LCA results with social media allows people across the web to view, share, and comment on product life cycle stories.

Software developers are starting to take notice. Companies such as Earthster and Sourcemap have begun to offer some supply chain mapping and LCA visualization tools. Leo Bonanni, the founder of Sourcemap, offers new capabilities that can add value to a company’s sustainability efforts. The beta version of source map is fascinating (see this source map of the Tesla Roadster). According to Leo, the next version of Sourcemap, due in June, will provide much greater functionality.

The current drive towards deeper understanding of products’ life cycles will create rich and exciting ways for customers, investors, NGOs, and consumers, to interact and improve the complex global system used to manufacture the products we use every day. We will be watching these trends and will keep you current on important new developments.