January 2024 The Shift e-newsletter

Use of LCA in North America Policy Webinar | ESG CEO Thoughts on Advancing LCA | Tax and Regulatory Initiatives Driving Sustainability | Upcoming Training

Free Webinar

Use of LCA in North American Policy

DATE: January 25, 2024

TIME: 1-2pm ET

PRESENTERS:

Lise Laurin, CEO, Earthshift Global

Nathan Ayer, Director of Research, Earthshift Global

DESCRIPTION:

LCA, or at least lifecycle greenhouse gas accounting, has become a solid part of North American policy. In this webinar, we will dive into two areas where companies are being asked to perform LCA—the Canadian Clean Fuel Standard and the United States Internal Revenue Service Sections 45Q and 45V, as well as other changes to section 45 from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. This webinar will be half informational and half instructional, with the experienced instructors providing guidance on how to get started on the needed assessments.

PRESENTER BIOS:

Lise Laurin is a pioneer in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Sustainable Return on Investment (S-ROI). She founded EarthShift in 2000, adopting these methodologies to support industries’ efforts at advancing their sustainability. Lise continues to develop and leverage EarthShift Global’s training, LCA tools and S-ROI tools to build organizational capacity and drive large-scale change. Her unique skillset and knowledge base has put her in demand globally by companies, organizations and governments alike.

Nathan Ayer has been working as a senior LCA analyst for Canadian and U.S. clients since 2009. He leads EarthShift Global’s consulting services and research by conducting LCAs, chairing ISO critical reviews, developing and delivering LCA training courses, and contributing to software development. Nathan also has experience with other environmental management tools such as Environmental Impact Assessment and has previously worked for government environment departments in Canada.

Some Ideas, Large and Small, for Boosting LCA in 2024

By Lise Laurin, Earthshift Global CEO

As 2024 begins, I’m thinking about changes that can help us move more quickly towards a healthy planet. Having worked daily for more than two decades in life cycle assessment (LCA), my perspective is naturally focused there; here are some grand ideas and some smaller and maybe easier ones that might have potential.

One smaller-and-maybe-easier one is to flip the script on responsibility for data collection. LCA tool builders have traditionally had to build connections with manufacturing software systems to generate single and multiple LCAs. Matching of the data in those systems to data in the LCA systems also usually falls to the LCA tool builders and, to a greater extent, the LCA practitioners.

What if we turned this around so the enterprise resource planning (ERP), material requirements planning (MRP), and other company-management systems took responsibility? Those systems could present data required for LCAs and greenhouse gas assessments through a specific portal using a specified communication protocol, allowing anyone to tap the data quickly and easily. With only two major LCI databases, the management systems would only have to match each manufacturing input to one or two different inventory items and they only have to do it once.

Navigating Green Transitions: Tax and Regulation Initiatives Driving Sustainable Practices

By Amos Ncube, Earthshift Global Senior Sustainability Analyst

In the global pursuit of sustainability, nations are increasingly turning to innovative tax and regulation measures to drive environmental responsibility and low-carbon practices. In this blog, we delve into some noteworthy initiatives in North America— the US 45Q tax credit program, Canada’s Clean Fuel Regulations and Industrial Carbon Tax, and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations and explore how they are shaping the landscape of sustainable business practices.