By Jim Cavan

Everyone remembers learning about the water cycle in elementary school. Water falls from the sky in the form of rain or snow, evaporates with the power of the sun, and condenses into clouds until they burst forth again, completing the cycle.

Simple.
But ask someone to describe “Life Cycle Assessment”, and you get as many explanations – or guesses – as there are people.

Enter UNH, which on Friday May 21st will be hosting the state’s first ever Life Cycle Assessment Conference at the Sheraton Harborside Hotel in Portsmouth. Titled “Competing in the Green Marketplace”, the day-long forum will include a distinguished lineup of speakers from across academia and industry, with the goal being to bring down to earth the often complex study of Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA.

The conference is cosponsored by UNH Professional Development &
Training in collaboration with the UNH Environmental Research Group.

What exactly is LCA? In short, it’s like a water cycle for consumer products – particularly the ones that can’t be easily recycled. It begins with tracking the extraction of raw materials from around the globe, follows the impact of transporting the resources to the manufacturing center, through the packaging and distribution, and finally, to the home, where it is consumed and, most of the time, discarded.

While both are considered “cycles,” there’s an obvious difference between the two: the water cycle is “closed loop”, whereas LCA is, at least intuitively, decidedly open-ended. In other words, far too many of our consumer products simply end up in landfills at the end of their “useful life”. The goal of the May 21st conference will be to find solutions to that problem.

Dr. Kevin Gardner, Director of the Environmental Research Group (ERG) at UNH, and the event’s chief organizer, is looking forward to helping businesses and professionals from across industries get a better handle on how their products are made and where they will eventually end up.

“We were initially approached from the perspective that lots of businesses out there don’t know what to do to become green or sustainable,” explains Gardner. “We’re just trying to provide them with the start of a toolkit that will help them not just become more green in their practices, but to also have them be able to verify their green claims down the road.”

oining Gardner in the day’s program is Greg Norris, founder of Sylvatica, a Yorkbased consulting firm which helps companies large and small gain a competitive advantage through more effective LCA programs, in the process helping them become more green as well.

The workshop also feature Catherine Benoît, the lead editor of a United Nations publication on Social LCA, who will present hands-on tools for company to understand better the key social impacts in their supply chains.

Norris and Benoit will be giving a demonstration of their software program Earthster, which is designed to help companies gather and link critical social and environmental data to improve their environmental and social performances.

Deana Aulisio, a PhD candidate at UNH whose research focus is Social Life Cycle Assessment, sees the conference as an opportunity to raise awareness about and simplify an often mystifying and complicated area of study.

"We’re hoping this will attract a large audience of businesses, particularly local ones with sustainability on their minds,” says Aulisio, who is doing her research under the guidance of Gardner, Norris and Benoit. “It’s an excellent opportunity to hear from experts in an emerging field that might seem difficult to apply at first, but that provides huge benefits in addressing the economic, environmental, and social impacts of business practices in a holistic, big-picture way.”

The conference, which will be conducted from 9am to 4pm, is designed to help everyone from plant managers to quality control engineers, human resource officials to marketing managers plan ahead for the growing competition in the “green marketplace”.
The guest speaker will be Nancy Hirschberg, Vice President of Natural Resources for Stonyfield Farm.

For more information about the event, please click here.