Client Spotlight: Eco-Products, Let’s Make It Better

We love seeing our work in action! Check out the product carbon emissions in Eco-Products 2020 Sustainability Report. We also appreciate their honest take on sustainability efforts.

“[W]hile cute hashtags sound nice and make for good social media stats, they don’t speak to the truth about corporate sustainability work: that it’s hard. It’s hard to be honest about the fact our products aren’t perfect. It’s hard to set goals with deadlines… and make them public (gulp). It’s hard to recalibrate our sustainability strategy every year to make sure we’re pushing ourselves to continually do better. But we do it.”
Eco-Products The Dish: On Earth Day 2020 (and beyond), Let’s Make It Better

Eco-Products, a leading supplier of sustainable, single-use foodservice packaging made from renewable resources and post-consumer content, commissioned us to develop and manage their Product Evaluation Platform tool, a simple, web-based LCA reporting tool, which utilizes SimaPro Share, designed to develop public sustainability reports and create customized customer reports.

This work helps Eco-Product’s sustainability team better understand and report the LCA without needing to build the underlying LCA models or use more complex LCA software. The tool, built in 2015 and updated annually, provides life cycle data and calculations that allow Eco-Products to explore opportunities for improving the environmental footprint of its products and operations, as well as provide life cycle data to the general public and customers. Each year we update the tool with new product SKUs and calculate the previous year’s product footprint for their annual report.

Eco-Products Carbon Emissions from their 2020 Sustainability Report

A deeper understanding of both individual products and product portfolio as a whole has allowed Eco-Products to make more informed decisions around materials and sourcing, as well as how to better manage its complex supply chain.

Over the years, Eco-Products has been able to build scenarios to both explore individual products and supply chains, as well as to create customized calculators that allows them to quickly and easily provide customers with detailed reports covering the environmental impacts of the total purchases that were made each year. These reports include footprints for the total of all products purchased, as well as more in depth analysis on the drivers of the impacts for individual product groups.

While the original, primary driver of the development of this tool was to have a better understanding of impacts of the product portfolio internally, the ease of use of the tool has allowed Eco-Products to offer custom reports to customers based on products and volumes that they purchase, thereby also educating customers on the environmental impacts of the products that they purchase. Overall, a deeper understanding of both individual products and product portfolio as a whole has allowed Eco-Products to make more informed decisions around materials and sourcing, as well as how to better manage its complex supply chain.