Why Real Ecological Transition Demands a Systemic Approach

In an era where corporate sustainability efforts concentrate heavily on carbon emissions, focusing solely on greenhouse gases risks overlooking broader environmental crises.

In this exclusive interview, Christophe Girardier, founder and chief executive officer of Glimpact and former steering committee member for the European Commission’s Single Market for Green Products initiative, reveals why a carbon-only strategy accounts for less than 30 percent of a company’s true environmental footprint.

He discusses how moving beyond generic industry averages to embrace the European Union’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology allows brands across textiles and retail to gain precise Scope 3 visibility, avoid harmful impact transfers, and embed dynamic eco-design directly into the product development process. This is the first of a two-part Q&A series.

Sourcing Journal: Many corporate sustainability programs focus almost exclusively on greenhouse gas emissions. How does Glimpact’s platform expand a company’s view beyond just carbon, and why is modeling the European Union’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method essential to achieving a true, systemic ecological transition?

Christophe Girardier: Currently, the focus of sustainability efforts has largely been on carbon emissions. This is the reality of how companies are trying to address environmental issues, but this is not the reality of the environmental crisis. The environmental crisis is not just about climate, nor is it limited to greenhouse gas emissions. It is a systemic issue that encompasses many other essential components that are equally as relevant and urgent as climate change. Because even if we were to succeed in halting the rise in the average global temperature, that would not be enough to save humanity.

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There are other important considerations besides carbon emissions that are part of environmental sustainability: water scarcity, ocean acidification, land-use change, biodiversity loss, etc. If we only focus on carbon, we exclude these and other crucial aspects.

This idea was at the core of the European Commission’s Single Market for Green Products initiative. This initiative, which was launched in 2013 by the European Council, set out to answer two very important questions: what is an environmental footprint, and how do we measure it?

This initiative, which lasted for 8 years and included scientists, government officials, and industry experts, of which I had the honor of being part of the steering committee, is at the origin of a new scientific framework: the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Organizational Environmental Footprint (OEF) methods. The PEF/OEF framework defines environmental footprint comprehensively, accounting for all stages of the product life cycle and considering 16 different categories of impact, not only carbon emissions but also important factors such as water scarcity, land use, ozone depletion, use of fossil and mineral resources, ecotoxicity, the challenges of biodiversity loss, etc., to constitute all of humanity’s impact on the planet.

The methodology is also configured such that it can be adapted to any industry through specific category rules (known as PEFCRs) and so that it can be updated as our understanding of environmental footprint evolves—the methodology is currently being adjusted to include two additional impact categories for biodiversity and microplastics.

The Single Market for Green Products initiative culminated with the Commission Recommendation (EU) 2021/2279 of 15 December 2021, in which the European Commission officially recommends to the EU member states the PEF/OEF method as the only recognized methodological framework for measuring environmental performance.

Following this recommendation, the PEF/OEF method was adopted by the EU as a reference framework for major EU Green Deal legislation, including the eco-design for sustainable products regulation (ESPR) and the directive on non-financial reporting (CSRD).

The PEF/OEF framework is very disruptive considering the current focus limited to greenhouse gas emissions alone, and radically changes our understanding of the stakes of the ecological transition. By defining a comprehensive vision of environmental sustainability, one which includes not only carbon emissions but all anthropogenic impacts on the planet, this methodological framework, which incorporates an aggregated environmental score based on weighted results across 16 impact categories, allows for the precise measurement and understanding of the environmental footprint of any product or organization in all its dimensions.

This approach thus establishes that the carbon footprint represents, on average, less than 30 percent of the overall footprint of any product or organization. Similarly, it demonstrates that a strategy focused solely on reducing greenhouse gas emissions can actually prove harmful to the environment when considering the overall environmental performance, due to the transfer of impact from one category to another. For example, an agricultural practice may have low greenhouse gas emissions but simultaneously have very negative impacts on water use, eutrophication, or soil toxicity, so that overall, it is actually more impactful to the environment.

The Glimpact platform we developed was designed to natively model this new scientific framework. It makes these complex methods easily accessible to all businesses, not only for measuring and analyzing the environmental footprint of a product or company, but also for understanding the explanatory factors at the appropriate stage of the life cycle and, above all, identifying the right levers for action to effectively reduce it. This radically changes how businesses relate to the real challenges of the ecological transition of industrial models.

SJ: Across industries like textiles, retail, and agri-food, executives frequently struggle with poor visibility into Scope 3 emissions and complex raw material supply chains. What are the biggest misconceptions or data traps you see brands fall into when they rely on generic industry averages instead of specific primary data to measure their environmental footprint?

C.G.: For many companies, their Scope 3 impacts are the major issue for their ecological transition. For companies in the fashion, agri-food, or consumer packaged goods industries, Scope 3 typically represents at least 90 percent of their overall environmental impact. It is here where the impact happens and here where the greatest opportunities to reduce their environmental footprint lie.

Understanding Scope 3 is one of the biggest challenges that brands face. Common methods for doing so, which include using monetary ratios or generic emission factor databases, are very imprecise, even erroneous, and their use is limited to general reporting. They do not allow for the measurement, and especially the detailed analysis, of the real environmental impacts.

For example, an agri-food company using a generic emission factor database may reveal that their chocolate supply chain is responsible for a large part of their company’s overall impact, but from this approach the only options for that company to reduce this would be to lower the amount of chocolate they make or stop making chocolate altogether, both of which are total non-starters. These overly generic and global approaches do not allow companies, in this example, to realize that the impact of chocolate is not found in the manufacture of chocolate, but in the agricultural practices of cocoa bean production.

The PEF method allows for a comprehensive modeling of the entire chocolate supply chain to determine the components most contributing to its impact—in this case, agricultural practices—and to identify the right levers for reducing these impacts. In this example, these levers include the type and quantity of pesticides and fertilizers used, as well as water resources. In other words, without this modeling at the right level and using the right method and specific data, companies cannot measure the true impact of their Scope 3 activities and, more importantly, they cannot understand the contributing factors and, consequently, access the right levers for action.

It is this bottom-up approach of detailed modeling, based on the PEF (Product Environmental Framework) of all components of a company’s supply chain, that not only allows for the analysis of real impacts but, more importantly, provides companies with truly effective levers for action. This is where we can speak of a genuine ecological transition, where most current approaches remain limited to overall environmental reporting, which only allows us to observe, but not to act! In other words, we must move from simple reporting to an era of driving environmental action.

This shift, from reporting to action, is only possible through this bottom-up approach, which provides detailed results of environmental impact and reveals the most effective action levers. For the example of the textile industry, a Glimpact study published on the environmental impact of the fashion sector revealed that the production of raw materials and specific manufacturing processes such as spinning, weaving, knitting and dyeing, are combined responsible for more than 90 percent of a garment’s environmental impact on average. Everything else—distribution, packaging, cutting and sewing, etc.—typically represents less than 10 percent of a fashion product’s impact.

Trying to reduce Scope 3 through generic means, either with financial data or with generic emission factors, is frustrating, since these do not give insight into how Scope 3 can be reduced. This insight is available through a detailed, bottom-up approach supported through the use of the PEF method to ensure that resources spent collecting and analyzing data are focused on what really matters.

S.J.: It is one thing to map out a product’s footprint, but it is another to fundamentally re-engineer it. Can you walk us through how Glimpact’s dynamic eco-design tool works in real-time and how brands are using it to simulate changes in materials, dyes, industrial processes or supplier locations before things hit production?

C.G.: What does eco-design mean? Eco-design means designing products with the lowest possible ecological impact. In order to do so, you first must understand a product sector’s general hotspots. Eco-design and hotspot analysis go hand in hand because it is not worthwhile creating eco-design strategies for areas of low impact.

For example, if a certain type of product’s packaging typically represents less than 0.5 percent of its environmental footprint, then eco-designing around this does not achieve much.

So, eco-design first requires an understanding of a product or product sector’s general hotspots. With this knowledge, through the Glimpact tool, different decisions can be dynamically simulated to see how changes affect overall impact.

For example, in the agri-food industry, it is well-known that cow products like beef and milk have a high environmental impact, in which a known hotspot is enteric emissions associated with cow husbandry. A driver of enteric emissions is the type of feed used. So the eco-design tool can be used to dynamically simulate the reduction in impact of milk and beef products that occur when changing the type of cow feed.

For the fashion industry, we can see the same thing for raw material choice and production conditions. For garments made from natural fibers, agricultural conditions at the farm level are determinant of overall product impact. Eco-design is used to see how different agricultural practices—low tilling, fertilizer management, irrigation improvements—affect total product environmental footprint.

Beyond hotspots, eco-design must be a proactive strategy, not a reactive one. Eco-designing after the fact, something that is much more common, does not produce the same effect. Optimizations made after the product is already in production don’t have the same impact as incorporating eco-design, and therefore environmental impact, at the heart of the product development process.

In other words, you design with eco-design as core to the creative model, not as a transformation of an existing approach. True eco-design means, from the very beginning, you choose materials and designs that enable the best possible environmental performance, and you do so at the initial conception.

In practice, a great example of a company truly instituting eco-design is Decathlon, a major French sporting goods retailer, which, through Glimpact, is increasingly deploying eco-design throughout its product development process for all products. As of Decathlon’s latest sustainability report for the year 2025, 53.9 percent of sales were generated from products that employed an eco-design approach. This has been effective not just in reducing impact at the product level, but for Scope 3 as well.