Amaury: So yeah, I think that today creating more sustainable products is indeed an objective for manufacturers. There are several triggers for me.
First, I would like to point out the growing importance of sustainability in our society. As consumers or as professionals, we are all actors of the transformation. Today, most of us are aware of the importance of the evolution of our society.
We have all observed the catastrophic events of the last months and years, such as heat waves and floods. It is no longer possible to deny all these extreme events. We all know that it is our duty to act in favor of our environment to have a livable and sustainable ecosystem. So this awareness of the current challenges leads to other elements.
We see that consumers want more and more transparency on what they buy. They wish, for a great number, to consume better. In this sense, the regulatory authorities are also aware of the current issues and are trying for the best in accordance with the desires of consumers to establish standards and laws pushing manufacturers and companies to be more transparent and more sustainable.
It is also important to highlight the desire of companies to become more sustainable. We have good examples in France of companies that did not wait for regulations to invest evenly in the circular economy and sustainable development. So today the major challenge of this topic is to obtain environmental data. We see more and more this desire and need for collaboration between manufacturers and their supply chain.
One of the keys to this systemic change is access to data, because without data it is not possible to have a real knowledge of the environmental impact of a product. Nor is it possible to compare products between them without a valuable point of comparison. So concretely, to be able to meet this need for transparency, it is necessary to be able to quantify the environmental impact of the product over its entire lifecycle.
And it is true, by obtaining and calculating the impact that it would be possible to establish a real eco-design approach in the product development cycle. And this way of calculating the impact has a name, it is lifecycle assessment – LCA – and it is a tool for eco-design.