Op-ed by Poul Lindqvist, co-founder & CEO, Environmental Impacts Academy.
Sustainability work has long focused on reducing harm, such as lowering emissions, cutting waste, and minimising the negative impacts of our actions, i.e. minimising our footprint.
These efforts are crucial, but focusing on them is only part of what businesses need to do. If we want to save our precious planet, we need to focus more on what positive impact we can have on the environment, i.e. our ‘handprint’. After all, we humans, and the businesses we run, can also have a positive impact on the environment. We do have the ability to do good things.
So how can your business make a handprint, and how can that be quantified?
Four steps to creating a handprint
- Understand your environmental footprint from a systemic point of view and define your baseline scenario
- Identify environmental hotspots and improvement actions
- Assess the handprint of those improvement actions
- Tell the world about your handprint
1. Understand your environmental footprint from a systemic point of view
Every product, service and process has environmental impacts across its entire value chain. Assessing these impacts and understanding what causes them is the foundation for identifying where change is needed and which change would have the biggest impact. This is the baseline you will compare to later.
An environmental footprint can be assessed with scientific methods such as Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is a robust scientific method for assessing multiple impacts of a product, service or process on the environment, over its whole life cycle, from cradle to grave.
Those impacts include global warming, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, depletion of natural resources and direct impacts on human health.
2. Identify environmental hotspots and improvement actions
An LCA study will not just give you an end result, it also gives you insights into what your environmental hotspots are, i.e. which material or process has the biggest impact on the environment. Depending on your product, they can be, for example, raw material extraction of rare earth metals or energy consumption in the use stage.
You can then focus on reducing those impacts to do less harm. One thing to note is that those hotspots are often outside your own company, upstream or downstream in your value chain.
Once you’ve minimised the negatives, the next question becomes: How can you use that same knowledge to create positive change, i.e. a handprint? And what is a handprint?
3. Assess the handprint of improvement actions against a baseline
Imagine that your company manufactures shower heads. Your LCA would show that the biggest environmental impacts of showering with that shower head are driven by water consumption. Now if you create a showerhead that saves water, it will reduce the water use and also emissions related to heating water and treating wastewater.
The reduction in the environmental footprint as a consequence of that, compared to your baseline scenario, is called a handprint.
Producing shower heads will certainly still have an environmental footprint, but at the same time, your company will create a handprint. Just like an environmental footprint, a handprint can be quantified for any impact category that can be assessed by an LCA. So you might have a handprint for water scarcity, global warming, or biodiversity.
Note that a handprint is also often outside the company boundaries. A company that makes shower heads is not the same one that supplies hot water.
As the example shows, a handprint is a comparative indicator. It compares a scenario with the new product or service to a baseline scenario where it does not exist, or where a less sustainable alternative is used.
4. Tell the world about your handprint
Once your handprint has been quantified by an environmental LCA, and verified by an independent third party, you can tell the world about it! You should share your story and show that you are doing good.
This will most likely benefit your business, and it can also inspire others to take similar actions and move society as a whole in a more sustainable direction. Imagine what a handprint that will create!
The author of this article works with teaching LCA. To find out more, click here.
