About

MISSION STATEMENT
The Sustainability Consortium is an independent organization of diverse global participants who work collaboratively to build a scientific foundation that drives innovation to improve consumer product sustainability through all stages of a product’s life cycle.

WHAT WE DO
The Sustainability Consortium develops transparent methodologies, tools and strategies to drive a new generation of products and supply networks that address environmental, social and economic imperatives. The Sustainability Consortium advocates for a scientifically grounded process and transparent system, not for individuals or organizations.

HOW WE DO IT - The Sustainability Consortium:

• Supports a fully transparent process and system for all data, methods, and algorithms; participants will know how metrics are derived and used to evaluate environmental and social impacts (data explicitly acknowledges and reports uncertainty in a standardized way).
• Leads a scientifically grounded approach to measuring, communicating and educating on the environmental, economic and social impacts of consumer goods and will identify opportunities for innovation across the entire product life cycle.
• Organizes the community of data users with new and
  empowering tools.
• Seeks to balance rapid growth, broad enrollment, cost effectiveness and data/methods development; underlying databases will be widely accessible, affordable, validated, transparent and designed for continuous improvement.
• Engages in modeling how innovations and changes in manufacturing and consumer use of products can address pressing sustainability imperatives around the globe.

FOCUS 2010-2011

• Development of Sustainability Measurements & Reporting Standards (SMRS) using a sector approach that aggregates environmental and social impacts into meaningful metrics:



• Create a Data & IT Ecosystem (Integrated data sharing environment).

a). Develop a transparent and freely available database for industry average LCI data and framework that will ensure data availability and quality to improve over time.

b). Advance Interoperable IT Systems: With LCA software companies, ERP software providers, and others to develop standards, methods, and processes to standardize the computational and sharing of LCI data in Supply Chains. Our goal is to enable supply-chain specific life cycle studies, while protecting company proprietary data, ensuring cost effective and efficient standardized reporting.

• Demonstrate the practical application of Sustainability Measurement & Reporting Standards embedded in the IT tools to show the end to end feasibility of supply chain sharing and life cycle methodology enabling identification of opportunities and better decision making to improve the sustainability of consumer products.

Additional research initiatives and projects will be conducted to support and enhance the sustainability reporting system:

• Product sustainability assurance: Development of cost effective methods and standards for providing assurance of product sustainability reporting.
• Use phase and end of life data: Conduct research and developing databases that advance our understanding of the impacts of consumer use of products, including end of life scenarios that model the impacts of how consumers dispose of products.
• Systems Research: Modeling and research to understand how this work can address global imperatives.
• Consumer Behavior: Understand business to business and business to consumer behavior through research that improves our understanding of how sustainability is being incorporated into buying decisions, and thus how the Reporting System can be enhanced to enable more sustainable buying decisions.

Participate

Propelling business forward.
For suppliers, manufacturers and retailers, membership in the Sustainability Consortium is a chance to participate in a transformative project. The Consortium will change the way product value is measured and transform the consumer market. A new generation of products and supply networks will arise, along with opportunities for innovation across the entire life cycle of any given product. Consider the benefits for business:

• Gain first mover advantage
• Enhance visibility in your supply chain network to identify value and sustainability performance
• Compare company performance with industry performance
• Contribute to the creation of new standards
• Access to innovative tools, best available science and technical support to find the biggest business and sustainability opportunities in your value chain using affordable lifecycle assessment

Participate. Leverage. Learn.

• Participate in the conversation – understand and create dialogue around the emerging standards
• Leverage the knowledge of sustainability leaders from across the globe
• Participate in the research to enhance the reporting system

NGO Involvement
It is the Sustainability Consortium’s intent to have formal engagement of NGOs. We are currently in discussions and receive guidance from several respected NGOs, and look to formalize membership in the near future with a minimum of 10% on our Steering Committee.

Open IO

Open IO is an Input/Output based life cycle inventory database that provides a free, comprehensive, transparent and continually improving resource for product sustainability information and analysis for both corporate decision makers and academic researchers. The project will provide information on the major impact categories (GHG, Water use, Toxics, Criteria Pollutants, etc). This project will serve as a core element to ongoing or future extension projects, including the Industry Average Database Framework, the Global Open IO model and others.

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