MIIS Professor Michel Gueldry, below, and James Knuckles (MAIEP and MBA 2012), right, spent last year working on a Directed Study of French and Sustainability Studies. They wrote a joint paper entitled “Promoting Products Sustainability through Life Cycle Analysis (LCA)” which was published in the September issue of VertigO, a French language journal focusing on Science and the Environment from the University of Quebec.
Professor Gueldry had this to say about the project:
In this article, we propose a way to analyze the impact of a product’s life cycle on the triple bottom line (social, environmental, and economic) — that corporate sustainability concept so often described as the reconciliation of the Triple P (People, Planet, and Profit) — to move beyond the excesses and contradictions inherent to the current unsustainable system, which can be described as the Triple C (Carboniferous Consumer Capitalism). Our analysis of the inputs and outputs that constitute a product’s life cycle connects the three complementary dimensions identified by Hendrickson et al., namely “inventory, impact, and improvement.”