Calculating sustainability in supply chain capitalism

Abstract

This paper examines the recent rise of life cycle assessment (LCA) as a supply chain governance tool. Many big brand retailers and manufacturers, as well as a number of governments, see LCA as a potentially valuable means to measure, communicate and thereby improve the ‘sustainability’ of material goods. The paper's arguments are threefold. First, the appeal of LCA's quantitative and seeming holistic methods must be understood in light of certain tensions and imperatives endemic to contemporary supply chain capitalism. Second, this appeal is tentative; it is far from clear that LCA can capture the complexity of products' ‘lives’ in measures that are simultaneously practical, legible and scientifically credible. Third, current public- and private-sector sustainability initiatives involving LCA offer opportunities to explore the increasingly important roles of scientific and technical expert communities in supply chain governance.

Keywords:

• governance
• sustainability
• supply chains
• standards
• environment
• metrics

Acknowledgements

A Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Society Burkhardt Fellowship and a fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University all made this research possible. Three anonymous reviewers also deserve thanks for their incisive comments.

Notes

1 As Barry notes in his work on ‘technological zones’, the analysis of metrological regimes is typically ‘best conducted in the middle of events … when the direction of change is uncertain and contested’ (Barry, 2006, p. 244). It is also necessarily multi-sited, and concerned with flows of knowledge between, among others, the metrological experts, their clients and their critics.

2 The journals consulted include, among others, the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, Journal of Industrial Ecology and Journal of Cleaner Production. The green business media sources included, among others, Greenbiz.com and Environmental Leader.

3 The historical geography of LCA is important to understanding its epistemic culture, but beyond the scope of this paper. Examples of large companies that use LCA in this fashion include Unilever, Volkswagen, SCA (a Swedish paper and forest products company) and Danisco.

4 http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.org/measurement-science/

5 Social LCA is an emerging but still highly experimental subfield of LCA; see Benoit et al. (2010).

6 Most interviewees – including those directly involved in either TSC or the French environmental footprint initiative – expressed similar doubts. Some however anticipated that the next generation of consumers would understand and care more.

7 Tesco cited the high costs and slow pace of carbon footprinting (with each product requiring several months) as primary reasons, along with other retailers’ failure to follow its lead. However, a former Tesco employee (and now food industry consultant) described these reasons to me as ‘smokescreens’ for the real problem, namely ‘the customer can't understand the measurement’.

8 Quantis, headquartered in Switzerland with offices in France and North America, grew from 10 to 75 employees between 2008 and 2011. Pre Associates, based in the Netherlands, opened a North American office in 2011 to meet surging demand there. Its main competitor, PE International, reported 33 per cent revenue growth in 2009–10.

9 Intensive livestock production (including dairy and eggs) tends to score better in LCA than organic, free-range or cage-free alternatives, because less land, water and feed goes into each product (Mondelaers et al., 2009; Tuomisto et al., 2012; Wiedemann & McGahan, 2011).

10 Betz (2011). On the ‘hype cycle’ see http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp

11 One of these countries is of course China, but the development of a national database of ‘fundamental’ products is under way there (Wang, 2011). The availability of relevant data is also improving rapidly in Latin America. In sub-Saharan Africa, it remains extremely scarce.

12 For instance, if an orchard produces both grade apples for direct consumption and lower-quality apples for juice, then a system expansion approach would assess the former in light of the latter's function (juice). The question becomes, if this apple juice were not available, what would substitute for it? The ‘avoided impacts’ of the presumed substitute are then subtracted from those of the eating apples. But determining likely substitutes (orange juice, water, milk?) requires much more market research, and even then the decisions are often arbitrary.

13 Although TSC's website still made repeated references to the benefits of LCA, staff members reported that its focus had shifted towards generating ‘category sustainability profiles’ (CSP) for broad categories of products (i.e. bedding, coffee, butter). These two-page documents summarize ‘the best available, credible and actionable knowledge about the sustainability aspects related to a product over its entire life’. They draw on published LCA literature, if available, but do not entail original research (see http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.org/smrs-how-it-works/).

14 As of mid-2012, France's Ministry of Sustainable Development had provisionally decided to measure products’ biodiversity impacts only at the farm level, rather than across the entire product life cycle. While this metric would take into account more site-specific considerations, some interviewees saw it as less scientific and therefore more likely to be challenged for posing a possible trade barrier.

15 For example: http://www.weyerhaeuser.com/Sustainability/Planet/GreenBuilding.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susanne Freidberg

Susanne Freidberg is Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. She is the author of French beans and food scares: Culture and commerce in an anxious age (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Fresh: A perishable history (Harvard University Press, 2009).