Should we collect product-level emissions (LCA) from our suppliers?

I'm getting concerned about #procurement's development towards a focus on product-level emissions or #LCA-data 🤔

⚡🤓 First of a small warning, this post gets a little technical/nerdy so feel free to ask questions is you want me to elaborate on anything in comments!

While understanding the emissions footprint of our purchases is key, and accuracy is key, I do worry about:

1️⃣

Are we going into an unnecessary level of detail too soon?

Suppliers are only getting started on the #decarbonization journey. If we optimize for #impact, step 1 should be to get your suppliers to calculate their #emissions, set targets to reduce those emissions, and hold them accountable to reduce and reach those targets.

Skipping straight to calculating and estimating emissions for the specific commodity or product your purchasing seems like a distraction as:

2️⃣

Calculating LCA emissions for all products can be extremely expensive and time consuming for your suppliers.

You'll likely receive a lot of pushback, and prioritization within the supplier towards the most important clients/products - not prioritization towards reducing the footprint of that supplier in the most effective way possible, as:

3️⃣

We'll miss a lot of global emissions if we only leverage procurement power to optimize for the specific products they're purchasing and not making the supplier as a whole more emissions efficient.

I can easily imagine a future with lots of product disclosures but little moving of the needle as we're missing the forest for the trees.

4️⃣

A focus on calculating LCA can reduce the supplier's reusability of that data, and hence having suppliers focus on disclosure vs. improvement.

Since suppliers very likely hasn't calculated LCA for every product, we see carbon accounting providers helping them do that through the platform the client is using.

This is generally great but becomes problematic if the supplier cannot reuse those LCA calculations with other buyers, if e.g. the buyer is not using the same carbon accounting system, or the buyer is incapable of reading existing LCA data and defaults to asking detailed activity-based questions.

This is already happening in social audits where suppliers get audited up to 50x per year on the same topics.

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So: accuracy is great, but let's be pragmatic and optimize for impact.

I suggest we push for getting suppliers to calculate their emissions, set targets to reduce them, and hold them accountable to reach those reductions. Only once we're mature on that should we start requesting an additional layer of detail and hold supplier's accountable for the same topic on a product-level.

If you got to the end, I'd love to hear what you think?