Assessing Product Impacts Over the Life-cycle
To identify our significant areas of environmental impact
and opportunities to improve, and to track improvements over
time, we commissioned a third-party (ERM) to conduct our
first Lifecycle Assessment (LCA). This is a common
methodology for assessing and documenting the environmental
impacts associated with all the stages of a lifecycle of a
commercial product, process or service.
The LCA leverages 2019 data, covering all of our food,
beverage and paper spend incurred in restaurant, and
identifying their environmental impact across carbon, water,
and waste (as defined below).
- Carbon – emissions of greenhouse gases, defined
as CO2-eq
- Water – the consumption of surface and
groundwater throughout the supply chain of a product.
Consumption is defined as loss of water through
catchment area, evaporation, release to a different
catchment, or incorporation into productions.
- Food Waste – the decrease in edible food mass of
food destined for human consumption throughout the
supply chain
Our methodology combines RBI’s information on the approved
food, beverage and paper products our restaurants source,
the locations those products are coming from, and generic
environmental data for the lifecycles of those products to
estimate overall impact. We used generic data points in the
absence of supplier specific data. For future LCAs, we will
look to improve data granularity, working to obtain more
visibility in the upstream supply chain in order to (1)
collect supplier specific data and (2) enable supplier
program development at the farm level.
The LCA we conducted will inform ongoing development of
RBI’s responsible sourcing strategy, where we will initially
focus on emissions reduction. This analysis is a useful
input in the development of our target for GHG emissions
reduction, and for our future work to develop strategies
related to water and food waste management.