For Matthieu Paillot, co-founder & chairman of Kisaco and an environmental and vitality engineer, “to go further in ecodesign, you have to succeed in lifting barriers”. In 2020, he co-founded Kisaco with the goal of facilitating environmental impression assessments and ecodesign for all organizations, giant teams and small companies alike.
“The impact assessment represents a significant cost of around EUR 10,000 per product, and it is a complex process using traditional tools, so it involves knowing how to position oneself in relation to the market, and then finding suppliers who can reduce this impact. We wanted to support companies in meeting all these challenges”, he says.
An impression calculation in 10 minutes
Due to the Kisaco Maker software program, each person within the firm, whether or not in a advertising or R&D operate, can discover out the environmental impression profile of a product in just some minutes. The evaluation focuses on 16 indicators: international warming, eutrophication (technology of inexperienced algae), particle emissions, ionizing radiation…
“Users launch the calculation, and then the tool provides the impact of the product for each indicator in ten minutes. You can enter the packaging and its origin, and the tool recognizes the INCI formulation, so all the users have to do is correct the quantities and proportions. This results in an overall impact calculated using the European PEF (Product of Environmental Footprint) method. The tool analyzes each product from every angle”, says Matthieu Paillot.
The calculation relies on often up to date information from specialised databases, together with Ecoinvent, in addition to on information Kisaco chemical engineers have labored on.
“We then deliver a profile, which is the weighted average of the 16 indicators calculated. This helps compare products within the same range and understand why one has more impact than another. Is it the transport? The formulation? The pack? And we also compare them with the market average to see whether we have a sustainable product or not”, he explains. “We work under confidentiality agreements. Users can only see what is relevant to their own products. The databases are secured and encrypted according to very high security standards, because they represent our customers’ intangible assets”, he provides.
Suggestions for enchancment
To go additional, the Lab Kisaco device makes it doable to view the information of the product in its present model on display, in addition to the weather that could possibly be modified to scale back the carbon footprint, so a before-and-after model may be created.
Lastly, customers can entry suggestions prioritized in keeping with their complexity and impression.
“This is the ultimate feature of our tool. We try to be really practical and pragmatic, so we recommend both simple steps, such as removing overpackaging, which has a huge impact, and more difficult ones. Once our customers have understood where their impacts are, they can go get the solution(s) from suppliers whose impact we have also measured”, explains Matthieu Paillot.
These suppliers had been assessed and confirmed as having a decrease impression than the market common, with no different business agreements with the startup.
Use circumstances
This method can be utilized at any stage within the lifetime of a product: upstream, on the preliminary design stage, throughout improvement, to optimize the method or packaging, or after the advertising section, to revamp elements and make sure the new configuration could have much less impression.
“It can also help obtain a score for your range, so you can rework priority products first. The results are not always obvious. Removing plastic, for example, does not always have the desired effect on the environment, or as regards climate issues”, warns Matthieu Paillot in conclusion.
