Organizations everywhere are concerned with measuring their environmental impact. Corporate social responsibility (CSR (News - Alert)) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives are good for the planet and significantly impact corporate profits and valuation. When a company acts as a good environmental citizen, it improves its brand reputation, reduces risk, encourages new investors, increases employee retention, and attracts new customers. Organizations want to demonstrate their environmental responsibility, but how can they prove it? Consumers are wising up to companies going through the motions but not really being green, a phenomenon called “greenwashing”.

Most organizations promote their sustainability in terms of carbon emissions, identifying ways to reduce carbon output by changing business practices or embracing carbon offsets. Reducing the carbon footprint is essential, but it is only one variable. To gain an accurate environmental impact assessment, you must consider raw materials sourcing, industrial processes, waste generation, packaging and product design, all the components and players of the supply chain practices, and more. Glimpact is a French startup that has developed a new approach to measuring sustainability that delivers an actionable 360-degree overview of global environmental impact across 16 separate categories. Some of their major partners include Lacoste, Decathlon, Sustainable Apparel Coalition, Greenyard, and Gant.

Glimpact uses the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Organization Environmental Footprint (OEF) methodologies developed by the European Union to give businesses the metrics they need to show their actual environmental footprint. The European Commission created the PEF methodology in 2013 to help companies measure the ecological effect of products throughout the entire resource and manufacturing life cycle stages, while the OEF methodology measures the potential lifecycle environmental impact of the organization as a whole.

Corporations must look beyond their carbon footprint to truly appreciate their environmental influence. Glimpact gives organizations a comprehensive view of their environmental impact across 16 categories and nine planetary boundaries, a concept adopted by the European Commission and the United Nations. Glimpact considers impact categories such as greenhouse gas emissions, water resource usage, land usage, fine particle emissions, ecotoxicity and human toxicity, ozone layer depletion, and biodiversity concerns, providing details to demonstrate compliance and provide the insight necessary to improve sustainability performance.

CSR and ESG are becoming increasingly important to North American corporations, although CFOs continue to question the financial returns of green business practices. Most corporations tackle these challenges as individual problems but don’t have a holistic picture of sustainability impact. Glimpact applies PEF/OEF-defined metrics to give corporations a comprehensive view of sustainability practices, simplifying ROSI calculations.

Glimpact’s environmental benchmark uses PEF methods to assess different products. The company’s database applies reference and worldwide data from the European Commission, EcoInvent, Agribalyse, and other sectoral databases. The Glimpact database also includes data on the environmental impact of thousands of raw materials and industrial processes. Using the Glimpact model, companies can get a complete picture of the environmental performance of any product by answering a few specific questions. The result is a PEF score, including a breakdown of each of the 16 impact categories, highlighting where the organization needs to focus to improve its sustainability record.

Companies seeking deeper insight into their PEF score have multiple ways to tap the Glimpact database. The company’s self-service model allows users to perform a self-analysis using a guided application that reveals the explanatory factors of the environmental impact of specific products, including analysis reports and eco-design simulations. Glimpact also offers consulting services to manufacturers and distributors, evaluating ecological impact factors and developing an impact reduction plan for a specific product, production line, or enterprise. The professionals at Glimpact also offer consulting on upstream manufacturing, setting up internal eco-design approaches to help choose the best components and suppliers. For companies seeking direct access to Glimpact’s technology from their existing IT system, the company also offers API to dynamically access business data sources or to deliver automatic environmental performance calculations for products.

To help individuals understand the environmental impact of specific products, Glimpact has developed two smartphone apps: MyGlimpact and Glimpact Scan.

The newly launched MyGlimpact app helps consumers measure their own environmental footprint. MyGlimpact asks questions about five targeted consumption areas: food products, transport, housing, household and digital appliances, and everyday consumer goods. MyGlimpact then analyzes your environmental footprint expressed as the number of planets that would be needed if all earthlings had the same behavior as yours. MyGlimpact dramatically illustrates how people can change their lifestyles to promote sustainability.

Glimpact Scan allows consumers to measure the global impact of food products simply by scanning the barcode. The app uses the PEF/OEF methodology to calculate the product's environmental impact, educating consumers about sustainable food production and encouraging them to embrace environmentally responsible shopping. For example, using Glimpact Scan, you can see that 1kg of chocolate is the environmental equivalent of 32 showers. The app also helps you understand what has the most impact on the product lifecycle, e.g., in the case of chocolate, the production conditions of the cocoa bean account for more than 80% of the impact, while distribution only represents a very minor part. Glimpact Scan is currently expecting a North American launch this year, but users can now access the entire Glimpact Scan database of the environmental footprint of more than 3,000 everyday food products and understand the explanatory factors.

Glimpact has recently expanded its operations with the launch of Glimpact North America, with headquarters in New York City. The company plans to bring its comprehensive approach to calculating environmental impact to U.S. and Canadian businesses, filling the void for a methodological framework that calculates sustainability beyond greenhouse gas emissions.