Integrating life cycle thinking to prioritize our actions

Premier Tech has identified life cycle thinking and ecodesign as key to making sustainability intentional and integrated into our products and services portfolio. Thus, we have implemented initiatives to structure and deepen our understanding of the life cycle mindset, developed a maturity index to track and measure our progress, and collaborated with external consultants to launch multiple new life cycle analyses (LCAs).

These initiatives will allow us to draw conclusions on many of our commercial offers and open avenues for strategic actions.

It has been decided to conduct simplified LCAs on products that account for a significant share of our portfolio. The simplified LCAs allow us to reach conclusions more efficiently, which can be applied to a large part of our sales and commercial offers.

They provide a thorough understanding of our products’ footprint and enable us to identify elements that otherwise would not have undergone such examination and proactive analysis. They also help our teams identify key improvement targets and partnership opportunities for the procurement of raw material.

Three members of the horizontal team share insights into the integration of ecodesign within their respective group over the past year.

Premier Tech Water and Environment has been integrating ecodesign into its business model for many years. Innovative concepts have been core to the research and development work that led to the conception of the Ecoflo® biofilter in the late ’80s. The members of the team responsible for this innovation were precursors, integrating life cycle thinking concepts such as life span, compactness, repairability and energy-less gravitational system. Recent LCAs confirmed the relevance of these elements, bringing the reflection on the Ecoflo® biofilter even further.

Supported by the International Reference Center for Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainable Transition (CIRAIG), the group conducted about fifteen LCAs on three products and many components in three distinct regions — namely Pennsylvania and Iowa, in the United States, and Québec, Canada. These LCAs will allow us to compare the different versions of these products and identify the design elements that could reduce their footprint..

Premier Tech Growers and Consumers has undertaken its first ecodesign initiatives this year. The team has familiarized itself with life cycle analyses and built a unit to oversee the integration of these practices in their Innovation, Research and Development process.

The group has adopted two strategies to get an overview of its commercial offers. The first strategy was applied to the professional growing media offer and has been executed with the support of external experts. The goal was to conduct a simplified LCA on various components of the media, acting as a decision-making aid in developing the optimal composition.

The second strategy resulted in the development and implementation of an internal express LCA tool, which provides a brief analysis outlining the most relevant environmental and social aspects to consider. This tool enables the group to better assess the impact of the wide range of its consumer products and integrate these takeaways into the product development roadmaps.

For Premier Tech Systems and Automation, which manages highly complex and specialized technological platforms and equipment, the challenges with its first steps in ecodesign lie in the breadth of its offers and the specificity of its components. The first life cycle analysis, just like the group’s GHG footprint, showed that the use on the client’s premises has the highest footprint of the life cycle.