Beyea, Jan, Consulting in the Public Interest, Lambertville, NJ
Currently, it is not possible to pick up a manufactured object and know how much pollution and environmental damage is associated with its production (embedded pollution). Such knowledge, were it available, would inform consumer choice. One of the difficulties with estimating embedded pollution (which can be done using the methodology of life cycle assessment, so-called LCAs) is that products are composed of a chain of components manufactured by different companies. The pollution database registry proposed here (called EnviroThead) would circumvent this difficulty with only a modest increased burden on industry. An agency, such as USEPA, or an industry organization would maintain the database, allowing public access to the per-product, EnviroThread) pollution numbers.
An entry for a product included in the database would not only include the pollution added by the manufacturer of the product, but also “pointers” to other entries in the database, namely those associated with the product's components that were purchased from a different manufacturer. A pointer would simply be the ET number of the component. Using these downward links, it would be possible to construct a chain of pointers from manufacturer to manufacturer, from product to component to subcomponent, all the way down to the mining or extraction level. A computer program could then sum the pollution along all these “threads” to obtain an estimate of total pollution embedded in a product's production.
To compute its pollution added a manufacturer would have to allocate its total toxic, climate-affecting, and criteria emissions that are currently reported across its product family. To make the pointers useful, a pointer to a component would have to be accompanied in the registry by the quantity used (e.g, weight) of the purchased component.
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