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Conclusions from the workshop “Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for SMEs”

Last March 13^th, we held the workshop “Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for SMEs”, addressed to all the Small and Medium Enterprises and consultancy companies interested in understanding how to apply the ORIENTING’s LCSA methodology to their own reality.

The event was divided into two parts: a first one to introduce the LCSA methodology and its role in the framework of key European policy initiatives on sustainability; and a second one with panel discussion on the topics of LCSA methodology that engaged all participants, the experts and three SMEs, industrial partners of the ORIENTING project.

Here our take-home messages from the workshop:

Materiality is a key entry point for those organisations wanting to familiarize with LCSA and an essential aspect of the methodology developed in ORIENTING. It is seen as a way to simplify the assessment as it allows focusing only on what matters and this, in turn, allows for process efficiency.
Data collection can be challenging, in particular for organisations within global value chains, and even more so for social aspects.
Sector associations can act as enablers for easing the communication and traceability along the value chain, especially for SMEs. At the same time, forthcoming legislation will be a big push to share information among the value chain.
Complexity: assessing sustainability is a complex task because reality is complex and simplifying too much is not the right approach. Complexity can however be eased by addressing sustainability as a process, i.e., a pathway with increased levels of details. For this reason, the sustainability assessment of ORIENTING is structured as a multi-level approach. The introductory steps in the entry level are a great support for companies to get a holistic view of the sustainability aspects related to the product analysed. Having this global view is key to define where to deepen the assessment and how to define the strategies to address the most relevant sustainability aspects.

If you couldn’t attend the workshop, or you have interest in watching it again, here you can find the recorded video.