The Net Zero Sausage Roll
Life Cycle Analysis: The Net Zero Sausage Roll?
A Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is an analysis technique that identifies environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product’s life, from the extraction of raw materials through to processing, manufacture, distribution and use.
In 2022, we conducted a manual LCA of a Wall’s sausage roll, asking ourselves ‘what does a net zero sausage roll look like?’ This was our first foray in product LCAs, and while it didn’t yield scalable findings, it sparked a big appetite to dig deeper into the environmental impacts across more of our products.
This year, on a mission to prove that targeted impact reduction is possible at scale, we worked with Sustained to conduct full LCAs across 31 Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) covering own label and branded products from Squeaky Bean®, Wall’s and Vadasz. The automated process looked at ingredients, production methods, transport and more, accounting for 16 impact categories such as climate change, land use and water scarcity. This data revolutionises the way we model new and existing product development, and we’re looking forward to rolling the system out to all Compleat brands.
Carbon Footprint (Wall’s Sausage Roll)
- tCO2 per year
- CO2e per sausage roll
- CO2e per 1kg of product
- of emissions are from the meat
- of emissions are from the margarine
The LCA work with Sustained is really exciting because it’s changing the way we think about environmental impact and will give us the tools to show how we can reduce our emissions at a product level. This means we can provide meaningful information about each product and brand, and actively work on improvements with our customers. It will enable much more specific Scope 3 calculations.