Nopa Nordic is now introducing a new tool for Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA). The tool enables you to evaluate your product’s footprint on the Earth – across many more parameters than just CO2 – thereby enabling you to make more conscious and informed choices. As a producer, distributor, or consumer
How do you choose the right products on the shelf if you want to benefit the planet, fellow humans, and yourself?
It’s an almost impossible question. For consumers, distributors, and producers alike.
Unfortunately, the result often ends up being simplified to a small fraction of the equation. It becomes all about CO2, and CO2, and CO2 again. Or the packaging’s marketing text mentions “New packaging with 20% less plastic” – without addressing whether the contents, for instance, contain allergenic chemicals or harm aquatic environments.
– Naturally, reducing CO2 is important, as is reducing plastic. But the problems is that, on one hand, we might end up making decisions that harm other areas, and on the other hand, we fail to
prioritize other equally important areas. We’re plugging the hole at one end of the boat while ignoring the leaks at the other end, says Mette Kolling Rothmann, CCO at Nopa Nordic.
New tool: Life-Cycle Assessment
At Nopa Nordic, we’ve been at the forefront of developing environmentally labeled detergents, cleaning agents, and care products for many years. Now, we’re taking it a step further by launching a new tool for Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA); a tool that, in short, makes it easier to assess a product’s impact on our planet.
– With LCA, you can assess how products affects the environment and people based on 17 different parameters. CO2 is naturally one of those parameters, but we also consider factors like air pollution, water consumption, biodiversity, natural resource use, harmful chemicals, and economics, explains Mette Kolling Rothmann.
This means that you gain a comprehensive picture – cradle-to-gate – of how your product influences the world around it. Thus, you’re empowered to prioritize and make the efforts that matter most to you and the world.
– We put numbers to it. This means you gain an overview, and you can see the implications when you make changes to your product. Suddenly, the reduction in plastic packaging is put into context, and it becomes clear whether it has any effect at all, notes Mette Kolling Rothmann, adding:
– This doesn’t necessarily make the discussions easier. But it makes them more relevant.
Hoping to inspire both customers and competitors
With this new LCA tool, we hope to inspire and guide our customers – the companies for whom we produce textile washing and cleaning products, for instance – to make more informed choices.
Of course, we also hope that this will eventually provide consumers with entirely different possibilities to understand the consequences of their choices. You can actually see which choice is best for the planet.
– We’re not there yet, and we can’t get there alone. That’s why we’re excited to take the next steps together with good partners, and why we’re also looking forward to the continued development of the tool. Right now, we’re at version 1.0, but just as the work to create increasingly sustainable solutions likely never ends, neither does the work with LCA, emphasizes Mette Kolling Rothmann.
