Site scale Net Positive is an ambitious and challenging goal that demonstrates a manufacturer’s commitment to “walking the talk” of sustainability within their own operations. However, the final manufacturing facility only represents some of the impact of manufacturing, and often pales in comparison to the scale of impacts represented by extraction, transportation, processing and more, within the cradle-to-gate Footprint scope. The “cradle-to-gate” scope of a product includes the manufacturer’s operations as well as all of the processes in the supply chains of all the inputs of energy, materials, equipment and even services needed by the manufacturer in producing the product.
If our “Footprint” is the impact that we cause in the world, then we know that simply achieving net positivity on-site at one facility on its own falls far short of what humans are capable of achieving and what the planet needs to heal. Knowing this, the Living Product Challenge also asks manufacturers to also look beyond the final manufacturing facility at the full product Life Cycle and create products that are Net Positive across three cradle-to-gate impact categories: water consumption, fossil fuel depletion and global warming.
These impact categories are the same as those often considered when defining impacts of product footprints: “carbon footprints” (in relation to emissions of greenhouse gases), water footprints (in relation to the consumption of freshwater resources), fossil energy footprints (in relation to the consumption of non-renewable, fossil energy resources), and so on. Impacts in one category are not additive with impacts in another category, so Net Positive is pursued one impact category at a time.
As noted above, for a vast majority of products, most of the cradle-to-gate Footprint is caused by impacts that occur upstream of the product manufacturer, in the supply chains of the inputs to final production. Alternatively, for products that require or influence the consumption of energy or materials during use or unfortunately end up in landfill, a major portion of the impacts occurring across the entire “cradle-to-grave” life cycle may actually arise “downstream” of the manufacturer, during the product use or end-of-life phases.
In order to achieve Net Positive within the Living Product Challenge consideration is given to both a product’s cradle-to-gate Footprint and production (final manufacturing facility) impacts. Ideally, Living Products should achieve Net Positive for both scales across all impact areas. Currently in LPC 2.0, manufacturers are required to offset the production impacts, the cradle-to-gate impacts, or both. These requirements are clearly called out in each Imperative and denoted with symbols. Manufacturers may have to consider that a product not only has to be Net Positive within the “production” scope (final manufacturing facility), but also the “cradle-to-gate” scope. Handprints can take place anywhere outside of the cradle-to-gate Footprint, and can come from influencing upstream impacts, downstream impacts or from generative actions outside the scope of traditional LCA.
