When I was old enough to attend university, I studied chemical engineering. I was excited early on by what I learned, but as I progressed in my studies, it seemed there was too much emphasis on cost and growing profits. It began to feel cold and frustrating to me. Then I began working on my post-graduate thesis, and my thesis advisor introduced me to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – a means of evaluating the effects a product has on the environment over its entire life span. I became interested in how LCAs help in identifying ways to increase resource-use efficiency and reduce negative impacts on the planet. I loved how it can be integrated into product design. This inspired me to pursue a PhD with a focus on using LCA to make the greatest positive difference.
As a research associate, I did some benchmarking with Corbion on lactic acid, polylactic acid and proteins. Through that work, I learned about the company’s sustainability mindset, which weaves through every part of its diverse business. When I found out about an open position here in 2022, I interviewed with Ana Morao, a Corbion scientist fully dedicated to sustainability (and now my boss!); I recognized my dream job immediately and moved to the Netherlands. Now I get to focus every day on what LCAs tell Corbion and its customers about our progress towards true sustainability in our business.
Considering everything
LCAs combine what we know about how sourcing raw materials, manufacturing, distributing, and using a product affects the world. The manufacture of a single product can contribute to changes in climate, land use, availability of clean water, the volume of pollutants in the air, and atmospheric levels of CO₂, nitrogen and phosphate. Collaborating with suppliers, site technologists, finance, procurement, IT and other internal functions, we gather data on resource consumption, energy use, emissions and waste generated at every stage of the product’s life cycle, including raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation and storage, and end-use.
Completing just one LCA is a huge, complex, time-consuming undertaking. Today, we have completed LCAs for 92 percent of Corbion’s many, many products. We are proud of that, and customers tell us they are impressed with the sophistication, transparency and granularity of the information we can provide them; it helps them better understand the impacts of their own products as they pursue their own sustainability targets.
Keeping it fresh
There’s a great feeling of achievement when an LCA has been finalized. But the victory is temporary. Things change: Processes get optimized, suppliers make improvements (or we change external suppliers), we find ways to measure more accurately or calculate more precisely, databases are updated, or other factors change somewhere within the overall supply chain. It’s important to refresh each LCA periodically to ensure accuracy, so we do it at least every 5 years.
It is an enormous amount of work, but we continue to get better at automating updates to existing LCAs through our collaboration with IT staff, external consultants, and other key partners and stakeholders. Just as we continue reducing impacts from our products and operations, we also keep improving the accuracy and completeness of the data that goes into our LCAs, while speeding the process of gathering it.
Knowing our role
As a supplier of ingredients that become part of so many different products used and consumed around the world, Corbion takes its influence on the sustainability of those products very seriously. It’s why my colleagues and I are so dedicated to our LCA processes, which help us continuously improve; that’s part of what it takes to “preserve what matters.” For me, helping to do this work just feels right. And I tend not to take things for granted so much anymore … things like the nature I notice every day and the little Greek village where I saw it for the first time.