ISO14001:2015- life cycle perspective of select manufacturing industries- a baseline energy, water, waste, GHG inventory assessment
Student name: Ms Medha Bantalpad
Guide: Dr Suresh Jain
Year of completion: 2016
Host Organisation: VNV Advisory, Bangalore
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Sandeep Roy Choudhry
Abstract: Manufacturing industries contribute a significant amount to global environmental problems, hence there’s immense pressure on industry’s to reduce their environmental load. There’s a demand for manufacturing industries to reduce their environmental impact throughout their life cycle. The manufacturing phase, in an industry’s life cycle has a significant impact in a product’s supply chain. Reducing the impact at the manufacturing stage itself can contribute to a sustainable supply chain even at later stages. However, reducing impact is possible only when the sources of the environmental load are identified. The method of qualitatively and quantitatively evaluating environmental load of activities in life cycle is termed as life cycle analysis. By conducting life cycle analysis, focus areas or hotspots of environmental impact can be identified so that strategies towards sustainable manufacturing processes can be formulated. Recent changes to ISO:14001 have made life cycle perspective as a part of Environmental Management System (EMS) of businesses, which make businesses and industries account for the impacts of their processes within their scope or boundary of their manufacturing processes. This study attempts to understand the life cycle perspective of select manufacturing industries by looking at their manufacturing processes in a “gate to gate†approach, assessing energy, water, waste and GHG inventory across manufacturing phase, in order to designate high impact areas, and it attempts to benchmark best practices that manufacturing industries can follow to reduce their environmental impact.
Keywords: Life Cycle Perspective, Life cycle analysis, ISO14001, Energy, Water, Waste, GHG, inventory
