NetPositive Sustainability: A Framework for Transformatively Sustainable Products, Companies, and Living

Dramatically accelerated reductions in the environmental impacts of product life cycles are essential to avert irreversible climate change; loss of biodiversity and unsustainable water depletion must also be addressed, among other impacts1. Due to prior technological innovation, there are cost-effective yet un-tapped ways to reduce these impacts, widely dispersed across sectors and countries, requiring increased incentives to develop and deploy innovations across global supply chains2.

The ultimate sustainability goal is to become net-positive – for the positive impacts of a product or company to be greater than its entire life cycle footprint. Although net-positive is increasingly appreciated by industry and stakeholders as highly promising, a clear definition of net-positive and a solid framework for credibly assessing and reporting positive sustainability impacts of companies and life cycles is still missing3. An approach called “Handprinting” has been developed which rests squarely on LCA and existing standards of footprinting, so that positive impacts can be directly compared with, and subtracted from, negative ones in order to assess net-positivity4, 5.

The approach is being tested in pilot case studies at personal, company and product levels. In one case, the introduction and deployment of a single new technological innovation by a diverse multinational corporation has the potential to completely compensate, by a factor of 3, for the company's entire global carbon footprint. In another, an international clothing company is discovering that retail stores can offset a full year's health and biodiversity footprints by more than 150% by encouraging peer adoption of off-the-shelf building energy efficiency technologies tested and proven within its own individual stores.

Initial results from application of this framework indicate that it can stimulate a high degree of employee engagement to create and drive adoption of innovation for sustainability across supply chains and life cycles. The goal of reducing a company's footprint faces diminishing returns and can never be fully achieved, while the goal of increasing its positive impacts beyond the threshold of net-positive is unlimited in potential. LCA methods, databases, software, and experts are poised to become key enablers in bringing this potentially transformative paradigm of net-positive sustainability into practical reality.

References:

1Rockstrom et al., 2009. Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society 14(2): 32

2McKinsey, 2009. Pathways to a low-carbon economy: Version 2 of the Global Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve. Available via https://solutions.mckinsey.com/climatedesk/default.aspx

3Green Monday, 2013. Net Positive: An expert crowd's view of Net Positive business strategies. Available via http://www.greenmondays.com/region/information_news_full.php?newsItem=82&newregion=1

4GA Norris, 2013. “The New Requirement for Social Leadership: Healing.” In S. Groschl (ed.) Uncertainty, Diversity and the Common Good: Changing Norms and New Leadership Paradigms. London: Gower Publishing.

5Handprinter: www.handprinter.org