Meeting People & Solution to your biggest Sustainability Challenge

Welcome to our second newsletter. It has been over a month since our first issue, time flies when you are having fun. We went to an expo, we got some interesting survey results about Finnish companies’ sustainability situation & challenges and we have planned our upcoming LCA training programs.

Meaningful encounters at Nordic Sustainability Expo

We tried to make some noise about it here on LinkedIn, but in case you missed it: We were at the Nordic Sustainability Expo in Stockholm last week. I could write a long story about how I almost did not make it to the ferry from Turku to Stockholm. There was some anxiety and sweat but I will spare you the details. What I do want to write about however is how inspiring it was to meet a lot of amazing people who were all there to listen to dozens of keynotes and panel discussions about various sustainability topics, and of course to meet us and the other exhibitors.

From a business perspective it was great to have so many conversations with people who were genuinely interested in building Environmental Life Cycle Assessment competence for their business or themselves. On a more generic level, it felt good to see that so many people work so hard to build a sustainable tomorrow for us. Of course, we were deep inside a sustainability bubble and we realized that, but it still felt good. So we intend to visit more expos as long as we can do so in an environmentally sustainable way. Meaningful encounters do happen face to face in real life.?

An especially nice part of the expo was the mingle, after the first day, when we even got to have a chat with Elin Bergman who runs www.cradlenet.se and https://nordiccircularhotspot.org and Bo Nilsson , driving force of https://asustainabletomorrow.com.se/ . Both are doing important and impactful work and were partners of the expo!

Future encounters - WCEF2023

Looking a couple of weeks into the future, Tanja Holm - Marketing and Environmental Entrepreneur and myself, Poul Lindqvist , will visit the World Circular Economy Forum 2023 which happens to be arranged in Helsinki and where we were lucky enough to be invited to attend on site. Online access is open to everyone, all you need to do is register on their main webpage . We look forward to more meaningful encounters with like-minded people, so connect and send us a message on Linkedin if you will be there, we would love to have a chat!

During the week of the WCEF2023 expo there will be several accelerator sessions and side events around Helsinki and Online, available to everyone. If you see someone wearing our logo, come over and say hello, it will be one uf us.

So why is that event relevant for us? What does Environmental LCA education have to do with Circularity and is Circular business always sustainable? Is an LCA even needed if you make things Circular? Well, Circular Business is not automatically sustainable and there is every reason to do a proper LCA for it, just as it is for any other business. You can learn more about that topic by watching our #webinar recording about the topic, available in the events section of our webpage.?

As business leaders learn to go Circular, they - or someone in their organization - also need to learn Life Cycle thinking. This is why we will be spreading the word about LCA as much as we can also during #WCEF2023

Your biggest Sustainability Challenge - Competence and Resources

Coincidentally, the Finnish organization @FIBS, the largest corporate sustainability network in the Nordics,? published the results of their “Sustainability in Finland 2023” Survey on May 10th, while we were spending our second day at the expo in Stockholm.

The report summary ends with this paragraph: “The main challenges for companies in the future are a lack of skills and resources: only 6% of companies consider their skills to be sufficient in relation to their corporate responsibility objectives, and only one in ten consider their resources and measures to be sufficient in relation to their corporate responsibility objectives.”?

A summary in English is available on the FIBS website.?

If we focus specifically on human resources, then it might be a good idea to recruit young and talented people with a strong drive to do something good. On the other hand, if we focus on financial resources, which all business leaders must do, then it is just a question of allocating scarce resources to where they are needed. Not an easy task but quite familiar to business leaders nonetheless.?

Upskilling your team is needed and yes it will require some investment but it is quite likely that such an investment will make business sense. That goes for acquiring LCA competence as well as many other skills that are needed throughout a business organization. Environmental LCA, which is what people learn at Environmental Impacts Academy is a fundamental competence for making any business more environmentally friendly. It is also very mich needed for collecting data to comply with EU reporting regulations.

With the right competence, People will make the right choices for Planet and Profit.

Upcoming LCA training programs

In our LCA training program, participants will learn how to conduct an ISO 14044 compliant LCA. It start with two weeks of very intensive academic level training followed by 8 weeks of conducting a real LCA, with support from our experts, for whatever product, service, process or organization you need. This video explains how it works?

At the time of writing this, late on a Wednesday night,?the start date of our Summer program is just two and a half weeks away, on June 5th 2023. You can still make it to join that one, but you need to act really fast!

Our Autumn program will start on October 2nd 2023.?

Our Winter program will start on January 22nd 2024

If you need more people with LCA competence in your team, don't hesitate do contact [email protected] or book a meeting .

If you are looking for a job or an?#internship ?doing LCA, then please?register ?on our web page.

Summer is just around the corner and nature is flourishing up here in the North.

Go outdoors and enjoy it!

Poul Lindqvist

Co-founder and CEO

Environmental Impacts Academy