Environmental Life Cycle Assessment in the Single-Serve Coffee Value Chain

There is a need for practical tools that enable businesses to implement resource efficiency in their value chains. In this paper, a mixed-method approach for assessing the life-cycle-wide use of natural resources in products and services is applied in a case study on a coffee value chain of the company Mars Incorporated. Material inputs along the entire chain were assessed quantitatively using the Material Input Per unit of Service (MIPS) method, while a semi-quantitative Hot Spot Analysis was performed to identify environmental hot spots. The paper concludes that combining the methods provides better insights into the value chain than using just one of either of the methods alone. For the company, the approach has proven to be practicable because it identifies improvement options and their value-chain-wide resource efficiency potential.

The paper "Integrating resource efficiency in business strategies: A mixed-method approach for environmental life cycle assessment in the single-serve coffee value chain" by Justus von Geibler, Katharina Kennedy and Michael Lettenmeier (Wuppertal Institute), Francesco Cordaro and Bruno Roche (Mars Incorporated) was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production and is available for download.