A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a vital tool for evaluating supply chain sustainability and assessing the environmental impacts at every stage of a product’s life, from raw material extraction through production, distribution, use, and end-of-life processes like disposal or recycling. By conducting LCAs, we not only measure our own environmental footprint and take action but also empower our customers to assess and manage their environmental impact better, enabling them to make more informed and sustainable decisions throughout their supply chain.
LCAs allow us to comprehensively evaluate key sustainability factors such as carbon emissions, water usage, and other environmental metrics. LCAs are essential in our industry for measuring and reducing CO2-eq per kilogram, whether for milk, egg, or meat production. While nutrients like rumen-protected methionine, lysine, or choline (found in our solutions) may only constitute a small portion of an animal’s diet, they can significantly reduce overall environmental footprints.
Tracking these impacts through LCAs is crucial for further enhancing our products. It helps us continuously improve the sustainability of our current solutions while also designing new products with sustainability at the forefront.
Beyond product development, LCAs provide transparency for our customers, empowering them to make informed decisions that reduce their own environmental impact. By understanding a product's entire life cycle, we can also ensure responsible sourcing, avoid deforestation, and minimise negative impacts across the supply chain.
At Kemin Animal Health and Nutrition EMENA (KAE), we've made significant strides in recent years by completing LCAs for a wide range of our animal feed products. As of mid-2024, we have successfully completed 39 LCAs and are on track to achieve 45 LCAs by the end of the year. With our sights set on the future, we aim to complete a total of 55 LCAs by the end of next year (2025).
One of the most rewarding aspects of our LCA journey has been bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders — suppliers of raw materials and electricity, as well as internal teams like operations, product managers, and procurement—and fostering collaboration towards a shared goal. Without their invaluable support and dedication, we would not have achieved these goals.
We follow a structured pathway to conduct a thorough LCA for each animal feed product. Guided by the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards, our approach seeks reliability and precision at every stage:
The insights gained through the LCA process offer significant benefits. For instance, the research and development team can explore new techniques or ingredients to reduce environmental impact. Meanwhile, supply chain analysis can reveal opportunities to improve energy efficiency, refine sourcing strategies, and enhance supplier engagement.
Conducting LCAs can yield great knowledge, but how we support our customers and other stakeholders with the understanding and usability of the information is of utmost importance to us. As such, we are working towards developing ‘footprint cards’ as a user-friendly way to present the results of our LCAs to customers.
These cards condense complex sustainability data into a practical, easy-to-understand format, providing insights into our products' environmental impacts. By using these cards, customers can make more informed decisions that align with their sustainability goals, allowing them to understand better and reduce their environmental footprint while benefiting from our solutions' broader sustainability advantages.
We also prioritise training our employees, specifically customer-facing teams, to effectively communicate our LCAs' benefits to customers. This ensures they can share valuable insights into our products' sustainability impacts. Additionally, we are developing simplified LCA tools for our R&D teams, allowing them to evaluate the sustainability of new products more efficiently and further integrating sustainability into every stage of product development.
“As a provider of key ingredients, we dedicate our time to exploring ways to make safer, more sustainable products that serve the changing needs of our world. At KAE, our curiosity motivates us to play a role in solving current challenges, and our commitment to sustainability helps us transform today into a better tomorrow."
— Dr. Stefaan Van Dyck, Group President of Animal Nutrition and Health.
We are proud of the progress we've made with our LCA initiatives, though we understand that sustainability is an ongoing journey. Therefore, we are committed to continuously conducting additional LCAs for our products in the future, integrating product sustainability into our research and development, and addressing less sustainable ingredients in our formulations.
Keep posted on our blog to learn more about our progress in terms of LCAs. To learn more about our sustainability goals, visit our Sustainability Journey webpage.
