Organizational Life Cycle Assessment of a Service Providing SME for Renewable Energy Projects (PV and Wind) in the United Kingdom

• Main Authors: Hendrik Marx, Silvia Forin, Matthias Finkbeiner
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: organizational life cycle assessment; service provider; supply chain management; photovoltaic; wind energy; SME
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/11/4475

Companies are increasingly interested in reducing their environmental footprint. Thereby, they face the challenge of identifying and mitigating their specific impacts and hotspots and simultaneously avoid burden shifting. The organizational life cycle assessment (OLCA) method was conceived and successfully tested for the assessment if companies’ potential environmental impacts. Still, the method poses methodological challenges for the application to service providing organizations. In this paper, OLCA was applied to a service providing SME in the photovoltaic and wind energy business in the United Kingdom. The environmental impact profile of the reporting organization is dominated by transport activities, including the technicians’ trips to the solar farms, employee commuting, and business travels. According to the main goals of the study (gaining insights in internal operations and improving organizational procedures), recommendations to reduce travel-related impacts are provided. For existing methodological challenges like selecting the reporting flow and setting the system boundaries, innovative solutions like defining multiple reporting flows for different activities and to partly include service receiving objects in system boundaries are discussed with the aim to facilitate future applications.