Today, PRé Sustainability, a sustainability software and consultancy firm with 25 years’ experience as leading voice in life cycle management, life cycle assessment and sustainability metrics development, launches SimaPro Share & Collect, a web-based platform developed to facilitate fact-based sustainable decision-making in an efficient, time-saving manner.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the principal quantitative, science-based approach for determining the environmental impacts of products and services and for establishing concrete, actionable sustainability metrics. With Share & Collect, PRé says LCA results can be made accessible to a broader business audience and can easily be converted into valuable business insights, enabling business departments to build a scientific basis for a robust sustainability strategy. Share & Collect is an add-on to the world’s leading LCA software, SimaPro.
“Sustainability needs to be based on facts, not intuitions,” says Mark Goedkoop, founder and CEO of PRé Sustainability. “Although LCA is one of the most robust, fact-based assessment methods in sustainability, it generates a lot of complex data. Transforming LCA results into business insights is a key challenge for every LCA expert.”
Interpreting LCA results requires expertise, and even answering simple ‘what if’ questions can take a lot of back-and-forth reporting and waiting. In addition, LCA can seem like a black-box process.
“We need to build a bridge,” Goedkoop says. “To make LCA benefits available to everybody, without losing the robustness, transparency and scientific rigour we have been bringing to LCA for the past 25 years. SimaPro Share & Collect can be that bridge.”
With SimaPro Share, LCA results become accessible and actionable. Scenarios shared through an intuitive web interface quickly show stakeholders the impact of their decisions in an interactive manner.
“Interactivity is crucial,” says Eric Mieras, Managing Director of PRé Sustainability, “because it allows users with any background to experience working with LCA results and converting them into business insights. They are actively generating information, not just reading a report.”
The effects can spread throughout the company, allowing business departments to increase efficiency for:
- Sustainable product development and modification
- Environmental product declarations (EPDs)
- Sustainability goal setting and benchmarking
- Streamlined LCA studies
SimaPro Collect is an efficient, reliable tool to collect data from suppliers and stakeholders, which can stimulate supply chain engagement and collaboration.
SimaPro Share & Collect is the result of insights gained from close collaboration with clients and partners. Roundtable discussions with PRé’s large worldwide partner network were held to determine the sustainability needs of businesses and LCA departments.
The official launch of Share & Collect takes place on 31 August 2015 at the Life Cycle Management 2015 conference in Bordeaux, one of the leading conferences worldwide about the science and strategic implementation of life-cycle-based methodologies.
Free trials are available to all sustainability practitioners who want to start working with this tool.
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Published Aug 28, 2015 10pm EDT / 7pm PDT / 3am BST / 4am CEST