Our Mission
We are a company dedicated to ensuring that the solutions of today are sustainable for tomorrow. Our mission is to provide accessible, affordable, and reliable services that can enable companies, governments, non-profits, NGOs, and individuals to better understand the dynamics between our natural and built environments, and enable transparent sustainability decision-making to minimize environmental impacts.
Our Vision
Our vision is to become a national leader in sustainability that can help guide Canada towards accelerated environmental and climate change improvements. We hope we can work with you to make those goals happen together.
Our Approach
We provide consulting and research services in the fields of sustainability, life cycle assessment (LCA), and environmental impacts across a range of sectors. We help clients understand comprehensive sustainability solutions that can often be difficult to achieve on their own.
Why Greenscale
Greenscale was founded by Dr. Nathan Manion, who has nearly 20 years of experience in environmental impact assessment, and has spent the last decade working on incorporating life cycle thinking and assessment as part of a more comprehensive and holistic impact assessment approach. Working with clients, Nathan identified common challenges across sectors when it came to understanding the transparent environmental footprint or sustainability of products, services, or developments. Greenscale was founded in part to provide trusted and customized solutions, using life cycle thinking, to understand environmental impacts and sustainability in a more accessible, objective, and transparent way.
What is Life Cycle Assessment?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a standardized method of assessing the environmental impact of products, processes, and services and considers all aspects related to the production, use, and ultimate disposal product, including inputs and outputs from each stage in the value chain (ISO 14040, 2006; ISO 14044, 2006).
Evaluations provided by LCA are usually expressed through midpoint analyses that provide measures such as global warming potential (i.e. greenhouse gas emissions) or other indicators such as acidification, or eutrophication, but can also be understood through endpoint analyses which provide a combined measure of total impacts.
Performing a life cycle assessment or including life cycle thinking into environmental and sustainability decision-making has a lot of value and advantages such as:
- Can inform the public and consumers – empower decision-making
- Can inform businesses & government – product design, process design, procurement, programs and policies
- Avoid environmental problem shifting by evaluating multiple environmental impacts
- Reduced pollution and resource use at all stages of supply chain
- True costs of manufacture and design by incorporating ecosystem values
- Illustration of complex relationships through dynamic systems approach
- Inform creation of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs)
Our LCA Approach
The environmental performance of our built environment is dependent on complex interactions between human activities and environmental processes where variability in local factors can directly affect the impacts of the choices we make, and by extension influence how sustainable development is rolled out and managed. Site-specific changes at the production, product, or resource scale can be highly variable and directly affect environmental performance such as changes in local climate and weather patterns, building codes, land management approaches, or the cost and availability of technology.
To address these challenges, Greenscale employs a detailed, modular system dynamic modeling approach that can integrate data from multiple sources and build custom assessment models to understanding complex systems as well as new and emerging technologies or services. We work holistically with our clients to develop accurate and transparent datasets based on local information and trends where we aim to avoid large aggregated inventory datasets that may not reflect local conditions and reduce accuracy of LCA approaches.
Our dynamic modular approach to environmental performance assessments also means we can also start to include other important sustainability indicators such as biodiversity incorporation of ecosystem service valuation, helping to reduce environmental impacts beyond just carbon and energy.
To learn more about some of the other ways Greenscale can help you, visit our Services page.
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