Product End-of-Life Waste

The Impaakt Team

8 min Read Time | March 21st 2023

Key Takeaways

When rating the value, consider the absolute impact. Ask yourself: How negative do you consider impacts related to end-of-life waste on the environment, like soil and water contamination, poisoning of wildlife, and GHG emissions due to decomposition to be?

When rating the severity of a company’s impact, take into consideration aspects such as how many tonnes of waste the company generated, the harmfulness of the waste generated, and it's persistence on the environment.

Remember to keep the score in perspective. The companies covered in the topic provide key products like electronics, automobiles, clothes, chemicals, food, beverages, and many others. In this sense, how the company contributes to end-of-life waste should be rated as a cost of the company’s core product contributions to society.

What are companies' environmental impact related to Product End-of-Life Waste?


End-of-life waste is the waste generated when a product reaches the end of its useful life. Consumers often bear the responsibility of discarding this waste. However, companies hold great responsibility for their products’ end-of-life waste impact, as they manufactured and/or sold them.

Different types of waste, like plastics, e-waste, and textiles, have different impacts on the environment. For instance, e-waste and plastics can release toxic chemicals into the environment, ultimately leaching into underground water sources. Being one of the most complex waste streams, currently, only 17% of the 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste gets collected or recycled.

On the other hand, when washed, textile waste releases microplastics in waterways, where they get ingested by marine animals and enter global food webs. Recent calculations conclude textiles release 35% of all primary microplastics in waterways, making it the single most polluting source of microplastic pollution. When textiles are finally thrown away, they can take over 200 years to decompose in landfills, leaching chemicals into the soil and releasing greenhouse gases.

Sources: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Frameworks

How do we incorporate the topic of Product End-of-Life Waste into multiple categories within our frameworks?

SDG Choice

Sdg 12

SDG 12 aims to ensure sustainable production and consumption practices. Managing and reporting food waste relates to this goal.

Impact Category choice

Impact category

Products: the impact is generated while using the company’s products/services (e.g., Containers & Packaging, E-Commerce, etc).

Investment Leaders Group (ILG) theme:

IGL theme

Product EOL Waste best relates to the theme of Resource Security (The preservation of natural resources through efficient and circular use).

SDG Choice

Sdg 12

SDG 12 aims to ensure sustainable production and consumption practices. Managing and reporting food waste relates to this goal.

Impact Category choice

Impact category

Products: the impact is generated while using the company’s products/services (e.g., Containers & Packaging, E-Commerce, etc).

Investment Leaders Group (ILG) theme:

IGL theme

Product EOL Waste best relates to the theme of Resource Security (The preservation of natural resources through efficient and circular use).

Get familiar with the 5 steps to get started as an Impaakt rater

Before building skills for a specific topic, make sure to read our Knowledge Center: Rating for Impaakt. This resource outlines the 5 steps necessary to get started as a rater and provides key information about our metrics. By going through this guide, you will ensure that you are well-informed to provide accurate ratings on any given topic.

How to rate the topic

Value


Value is the absolute impact the topic has on the planet or society. To assess the value you need to think about how positive or negative you consider the topic and the impact described.

The value is linked to the topic treated and not to the company’s specific impact. Thus, the value should hold some consistency across industries.

When deciding your rating on the value, ask yourself:
How negative do you consider impacts related to end-of-life waste, like soil and water contamination, poisoning of wildlife, and GHG emissions due to decomposition, to be?
Note: Due to the nature of this topic, it should be rated negative or strongly negative.


Severity


The severity is related to the company’s impact. It consists of three dimensions: Scale, Scope, and Irremediability.
Scale

Scale is related to the complexity and profundity of the impact described (i.e., it's related to the extent of the impact).
When deciding the scale, answer the following questions:
  • Is the type of end-of-life waste generated by the company extremely harmful (eg. e-waste, plastic), or only slightly harmful (eg. paper, natural fibers) to the environment?
  • Does it release toxic chemicals into the environment that can harm biodiversity? Or is it unreactive but occupies vital space in landfills?
  • How is this type of waste generally treated? Is it mostly recycled/reused? Or is it not widely recycled and ends up in the ecosystem?
  • Does the waste produced biodegrade in a short span of time or persist in the environment for a few years or hundreds of years?
Scope

The scope captures the range or extent of the company’s impact and it is related to the quantitative part of the analysis. For this topic, the scope is multi-dimensional and can be addressed from different angles considering what is disclosed in the analysis.
When deciding the scope, answer the following questions:
Irremediability

Irremediability evaluates the impact of the company over time (i.e., is linked to the duration of the impact described)
When deciding the irremediability, answer the following questions:
  • Is the company consistently producing products that become waste at their end of life?
  • Is it implementing measures to collect back its products that have reached the end of life in order to reduce end-of-life waste?
  • Is it likely that it will continue impacting the environment in the future?

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