Deborah Fleischer, founder and president of
Green Impact, works with mid-sized companies to launch green initiatives . In a recent entrepreneur's coaching event, she observed three key challenges common to many of the companies she spoke with.
1. Lifecycle assessment (LCA): LCA is an approach that considers the
cradle-to-grave lifecycle chain involved in producing, using and
disposing of a product or service. It forces you to consider materials
use, energy consumption and related greenhouse-gas emissions of your
product, packaging and transportation decisions.
While larger
corporations might have the resources to tackle LCA head on, across the
board, the start-ups were struggling with easily accessing good data to
help them estimate the key impacts associated with their entire value
chain.
A few LCA resources for start-ups to consider include Sustainable Minds, Earthster and EIO-LCA.
2. Packaging: Many of these clean tech products require packaging and
pushing for recycled content and avoiding plastic is a challenge for a
CEO with twenty other competing priorities.
The Sustainable Packaging Coalition is a great resource on this issue.
3. End of life: Thinking about what happens to these new "clean"
products at end of life is challenging. How do you create incentives to
get consumers to recycle or return a product? One of the start-ups was
considering a rebate program and another planning on using a mailer to
make it easy to return the product at the end of its life.
Read more at Matter Networks
Deborah Fleischer, founder and president of Green Impact, works with mid-sized companies to launch green initiatives that encourage innovation and grow market share.