Join us in building an ecosystem of informed change-makers
The momentum for sustainable change is here. A lot of people are aware of the need and urgency, and we seem to have reached a critical mass. Companies, consultants and governments all see the opportunities – some commercially driven, others intrinsically motivated, and some both at the same time. To meet the needs of all these people and institutions, scaling up the world’s LCA capacity is critical. This requires community, which PRé is always working to strengthen. What is your vision for the next step in sustainability? Perhaps we can partner up, combining PRé’s expertise and yours to achieve something greater together.
We are reaching the limits of what experts can do
From our very first start as a fact-based sustainability consultancy, we realized that we could not tackle the challenges ahead on our own. For that reason, we have always focused on collaborating with others, like our longstanding partner network, and on building an ecosystem of people, tools and companies. This has led to a long list of projects that all utilize the power of the community to work toward a shared vision.
And we are going to need that collaboration if we want to succeed in our ambition of making LCA an integral part of all industries. If you consider that there are a few thousand LCA Experts and billions of products, the math is easy: that will not be sufficient to cover everyone’s needs. Getting started with and increasing people’s engagement with sustainability is often not that difficult. At some point, though, companies and organizations run into the limitations of their simplified tools and solutions. We need tools that can handle these higher-level demands at scale, so there is less pressure on the people and companies that have in-depth knowledge in the field.
Investing in the LCA ecosystem is the way forward
To scale up LCA to the extent that is needed requires improvements, innovation and synergy on many different levels. The end goal is a fully digital approach that is available in easy, accessible ways without compromising on the robustness. People need to be able to get clear insights that allow them to make real changes, but they also need to be able to drill down in the underlying details of the model.
Building an ecosystem of people and solutions is the only way this can happen. We’re working together with many different types of people and organizations, to be able to accelerate this development. Perhaps you can be one of them? To inspire you, we will share some of the very different collaborations we have had.
- Clients: We partnered with P&G to build a solution to distribute robust LCA knowledge and data throughout the company, so packaging designers can make their own decisions. We have now also brought this solution to the broader market as the P-ACT tool.
- SimaPro: What started as “Mark (the founder of PRé) and friends” developed into a professionally managed network of 24 partners, who are all experts in LCA in their specific region. All of them are pioneers who believe in the power of collaboration and developing long-term relationships with both their clients and with PRé.
- Consultants: In many sectors, the need for reliable footprint information is high. That requires sector-specific knowledge as well as in-depth experience with LCA and LCA tools. By combining our expertise with that of sector-oriented consultants, we can create tools with a wider reach. One such example is the bAwear Score tool.
- LCA Experts: The partners from our Global Partner Network are not the only LCA experts we collaborate with. We also work with others to help digitize their knowledge. One of our current projects is the NorEnviro project to make data from Norwegian research organizations and companies more widely available. This should help prevent doing the same study twice and to improve the quality of LCA analyses.
- Technology: In the end, LCA is a means – not a goal in itself. That is why we believe that we can have the highest impact if the capabilities of SimaPro are integrated in software and tools that people use on a daily basis. With that in mind, we’re actively partnering with a number of software providers to integrate solutions, like we did in the Dutch dairy sector.
- Integration: Speaking of integration… we have set up a collaboration with one of the largest system integrators globally. Our goal is to calculate the environmental impact for an entire company by connecting data from the IT infrastructure of global companies with our SimaPro platform. We have started a proof of concept at two sites, aiming to roll it out across all the company’s sites.
These are just a few of our collaborations. We also contribute to initiatives in the LCA field, like the Life Cycle Initiative and FSLCI, and to research projects such as ECOFACT and ORIENTING. Taking a leading role in these initiatives helps us to bring innovation to what we do.
We hope that these examples have shown you that there are many ways to build community and take the next step forward. Do you have an idea and do you think PRé has the right expertise, approach and values to be a partner for you? If our visions match and you want to explore opportunities, then don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’m happy to explore opportunities.
Eric Mieras
Managing Director
Sustainability is all about impact. Positive impact makes you meaningful. But first you have to know where you are making an impact and where you can create shared value. That’s where PRé comes in. Pinpointing your impact is an essential starting point for taking joint action with people and organisations in your ecosystem. The combination of sustainability and social business can make a real change in the way we do business.