Industry-Specific Impact Assessment Methods

Session Coordinator: Lise Laurin

This session will explore questions concerning industry-specific impact assessment methods: Is there a need for these methods? If so, what benefit could be derived from them? How do you go about creating them? To address this, each of our panelists will present their perspective and then we will have a panel discussion with questions from the panelists as well as from the audience.

Panel Members:

Lise Laurin, EarthShift, Panel Moderator: Lise has worked with many companies on company-specific impact assessment methods. These methods reflect the major impacts of the company’s products and the values of the company and its stakeholders. She is currently working to get the electronics industry together to create an industry-specific impact assessment method.

Gary Jakubcin, Owens Corning: Gary worked within Owens Corning to create a company-specific impact assessment method. He will discuss the process that they used to create the method and their thoughts about how an impact assessment method for the building industry might help or hinder them.

Amy Landis, University of Pittsburgh: Amy used various impact assessment methods to look at biofuels production. She will discuss the weaknesses of existing methods and the need for better methods for specific industries.

Gretchen Govani, SABIC Innovative Plastics: Gretchen will take the plastics industry perspective and the need to satisfy the demands of multiple industries (automotive, buildings, electronics to name a few) in addition to existing demands of methods such as EPEAT, MDBC, etc.