You now know that digital technologies have an environmental impact. You want to take action, but you’re not sure how or what actions have the greatest impact. That’s normal; environmental impacts come from various sources and have diverse effects (greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, soil and air pollution, etc.).
To clarify things, Simbios offers an environmental audit of your digital services. This is called a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for short. This method follows the ISO 14040/44 standards, and the consultant is certified .
Defining the Study Framework
The first step of this analysis will be to define the objectives, but more importantly, the scope of the study. This could be:
- A product
- A company / department / subsidiary
- A website or application
Inventory
This audit is called a Life Cycle Analysis because it looks at all the necessary stages for the studied scope to function. The goal here is to create the most comprehensive inventory possible of inputs and outputs. This includes:
- Manufacturing
- Distribution
- Usage
- End-of-life
Environmental Impact Evaluation
It’s now necessary to translate all the steps listed in the inventory into environmental impacts. These impacts can be measured according to various criteria:
- Contribution to climate change
- Water pollution
- Water consumption
- Depletion of natural resources
- Land acidification
- Ozone layer depletion
- Radiation
- And more!
Interpretation
Now that all the data is gathered, it needs to be processed to give it meaning. In this step, we focus on identifying the main sources of environmental impact and categorizing the key stages.
In some cases, we may compare the results obtained with other Life Cycle Analyses (found in the literature, based on a similar product or from previous years).
We will also discuss the limitations of this analysis (accuracy of results, unstudied areas, etc.).
Finally, we will work on an optimal approach to communicating the results (internally and, if necessary, externally).
Implementing a Reduction Strategy
Now that we know the environmental costs of the studied scope, it’s possible to build a strategy to reduce the footprint. We will look at this in the next step.