On July 15th, 2015 – Junk That Funk was accepted into a project run by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) Life Cycle Initiative. We’d responded to an international call for participation in a road test of new environmental performance evaluation guidelines. The call claimed to favour the participation of small medium enterprises (SMEs), as none had yet tried out the UNEP/SETAC’s guidance – published as Organizational Life Cycle Assessment Guidance Document, 2015. Needless to say, Junk That Funk are proud to represent Canadians and small businesses in this international effort to define best-practices in environmental performance evaluation.
“We are a locally owned Ottawa business with a reputation of running an efficient junk removal business. We already prefer to divert what we collect to reuse and recycle options, but now we see that not all options are created with equal environmental risk. So how do we run the service we provide in-line with the UNEP/SETAC’s guidance? ”
– Cory Desormeaux, Junk That Funk
The project kicked off on September 25th, 2015 with a training webinar attended by the international group of organizations participating in the road test. Here we learned that UNEP/SETAC’s guidance mainly builds on existing International Organization for Standardization (ISO) environmental performance evaluation technical standards – ISO 14072 for organizational life cycle assessment (OLCA, which sounds like ‘ol-cah’) and ISO 14044 for product life cycle assessment (PLCA, which sounds like ‘pol-cah’). So we are branding our own participation in the road test as doing the ol-cah pol-cah, mainly because upon reading these documents we noticed that the language was very boring and imagine a sing-along dance helping. Think something like the Hokey Pokey Dance but with the UNEP/SETAC guidance and ISO technical standards ;p
Has your organization checked out the ol-cah pol-cah guidance?
How do you evaluate environmental performance and interpret how sustainable your decisions are?
Please engage in this international conversation and learn along with us. Connect with us on social media and show your support with calls for junk removal services, we’d love to tell you how the ol-cah pol-cah guidance is going ;p
Questions? Comments? Share them here. Looking to remove junk from your residence or office? Book online, check out our pricing, or contact us!
Hey guys – good luck with the road testing. Yeah – the language of all the documents is pretty dry, but I hope you’ll get through it and that it’ll be a good experience that we can all learn from!