Our Senior Sustainability Specialist Joel Edwards is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) expert who likes to make complicated data easy to understand. We catch up with him to talk about making infrastructure more sustainable and how businesses can navigate uncertainty (hint – they both involve LCA)
What are the most important things to cover when you're doing a Life Cycle Assessment?
We work with clients to define the system boundaries, and understand their processes and what they want to achieve. This can be an initial high-level screening LCA to get, for example, a better idea of hotspots in a manufacturing process or it can go into a lot of detail. That sets them up for the appropriate measurements and data collection that will ultimately help them with decision-making.
It’s good to cover where the energy for a process is coming from. Is it generated on-site, from a renewable source or can the client use some of the heat they’re producing at their manufacturing plants? Designing for products to be recycled and sourcing recycled products are other areas to improve sustainably.
Joel Edwards
Tell us about your PhD
I looked at the best way to turn municipal organic waste into something valuable and managed sustainably. It was intriguing to look at technologies like anaerobic digestion to treat food waste from home rubbish bins and sewage sludge. I found that you can export energy from the waste and generate a viable soil product that helps certain crops or pastures thrive. It can also store carbon and I did a lot of modelling of biogenic carbon dynamics. Modelling it was good fun, frankly, when you’re helping prove the value of ‘waste.’
Joel has looked at processing wastewater treatment and the greenhouse gases that are emitted
Are modelling and Excel spreadsheets a big part of your job?
I enjoy playing around with equations and making calculators that work for the client. Making something that is useable, does complicated things with data and looks good is great. That gives power to our clients and their consumers to look at, say, an individual product and see its environmental impacts.
How does your work help clients?
The clear and scientific approach we take is helpful. A layperson who's not sustainability-minded can get a bit lost in technical talk. When we create a calculator or when our communications team does their work, the data becomes more accessible. That’s where thinkstep-anz shines. We empower people by making complicated science bite-sized and accessible. Our clients can then act.
How can businesses navigate uncertainty or disruption?
The LCA process is about understanding your supply chains and processes. With an LCA you understand more about each part of your supply chain or your processes. It's a systematic way of understanding what you can control and then planning accordingly.
Joel is excited about organic waste management like composting, anaerobic digestion and biochar
How can you make infrastructure more sustainable?
Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) are great. The more the construction industry adopts them and publishes EPDs the better. It gives construction firms, suppliers and consumers the tools to make sustainable decisions.
Companies want to be sustainable, but they mightn’t know how to achieve it. They can get a bit tangled up and may accidentally ‘greenwash’ in the process. EPDs help avoid this because they’re verified, science-based and backed by ISO standards, so it holds up to scrutiny.
How do you overcome tricky problems at work?
At thinkstep-anz we constantly work together. There's rarely a problem that hasn't been dealt with by a colleague. So we're on the phone or Teams to work through it that way.
Working collaboratively with our clients is important too. They know their businesses. You could check in with process engineers, facility managers or sustainability managers and get an answer for what may have been missed. Trying to solve the problem collectively is the best way to go.
What brought you to thinkstep-anz?
I did LCA in my PhD and then worked for a water and sewage utility service provider for about five years. I did some awesome work in resource recovery and the circular economy there, but I wanted to get back to technical LCA work and also broaden my scope of sustainability. That was the big reason for coming to thinkstep-anz. I get to apply my skills across so many different industries.
What's the most sustainable and unsustainable thing you've done recently?
I have a cupboard in my laundry full of reusable bags. I keep having to buy them because I forget the ones I already have. That's pretty poor.
We're renovating my house. It’s a real ‘doer-upper’ that we're ‘revitalising’. I guess that’s a tick for sustainable. Though, we took down the back veranda which gets the hot afternoon sun. We’ll replace it next year, but our air conditioner is running overtime because of the extra heat. Maybe we would not do that during the summer next time.
We also bought an EV in December – that reduces a big chunk of our greenhouse gas footprint.
Joel's family fast charging their car on their first EV road trip
What are you passionate about outside of work?
I have a young family, they're awesome to have around. I’m a big sports fan, especially AFL (Aussie Rules). I grew up playing it but now I watch it and pretend that I can still play. I support Essendon. I also follow international football. So sometimes I’m up at 1am to watch Leeds United or Barcelona.
7 March 2023
