Hotspot Scenario Analysis: Comparative Streamlined LCA Approaches for Green Supply Chain and Procurement Decision Making

Increasingly, organizations are working to reduce the environmental footprint of their supply chains. The use of environmentally preferable purchasing criteria is one strategy organizations use to address this goal. However, evaluating the environmental performance of these criteria (e.g., recycled content, biodegradable, renewable, and so on) has remained elusive. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can measure the impact reduction potential of sourcing strategies. However, full process-based LCAs are time-consuming and costly across multiple criteria of thousands of products and inputs purchased in an organizational setting. A streamlined hotspot methodology is presented using a combination of environmentally extended economic input-output (EEIO) approaches and extant literature to identify hotspots in which to constrain a parameterized process-based LCA. A case study of breakfast cereal manufacturing is developed to (1) assess the efficiencies associated with the hotspotting approach and (2) demonstrate its applicability in generating comparable decision signals of environmentally preferable sourcing criteria for procurement and supply-chain managers along the dimensions of global warming potential and water use.