A validation by the board or a buy-in from senior management is what every sustainability professional dreams of as he or she helps craft a sustainability framework for the company.It was, therefore, with some trepidation that Abhay Pathak set about making a presentation to a Tata Motors’ board committee with celebrated scientist Raghunath Mashelkar as chair. Pathak, the Sustainability Lead at the company’s Engineering Research Centre (ERC) in Pune, presented the hotspots on the life-cycle assessment (LCA) of the Nano car, the fi rst ever cradle-to-grave analysis of an entire vehicle by Tata Motors, nay the Indian automobile industry.Usually, the environmental impact of a vehicle is measured by its tailpipe emissions. Now, with cradle-to-grave approaches from raw material mining to the end-of-life stage, a true, big-picture impact measurement is possible. An LCA in this genre can be huge and time-consuming: a typical car is cobbled together with over 5,000 parts of roughly 50 different materials — steel, plastic, rubber, alloys, glass, even precious metals — sourced from over 200 suppliers. Mashelkar was impressed with the work done but he wanted to dive deeper. “He wanted to know how the Nano, over its life-cycle, compared with a threewheeler autorickshaw,” recalls Pathak.Enthused by the proactive engagement by the board, the crack team of three engineers steering LCAs in the company since 2010, got back to work on the three-wheeler bit. They also, for good measure, included an LCA of the Nano CNG car, which was by then already in the market. As it turned out, emissions from a three-wheeler were just about a shade lower than that of the petrol Nano.The Nano CNG car is however greener than a conventional three-wheeler. The true validation of Pathak’s work, and also those of several other LCA teams in other Tata companies, came in June 2015, when Tata Group chairman Cyrus Mistry incorporated product stewardship and LCA as one of the key principles of the Tata sustainability policy.“Much of our work in sustainability is within the fence,” says Shankar Venkateswaran, chief, Tata Sustainability Group. “We are trying to create a larger framework and look across value chains.” The $42-billion Tata Motors, India’s largest automobile maker, is one of the few companies infusing life-cycle thinking within and across its vendors. It’s about time too. Globally, the transportation sector accounts for over 23% of carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion. In a business- as-usual scenario, it is expected to grow by 40% from 2007 to 2030. Road sector emissions dominate transport emissions. In India, it’s 87% with aviation at 7% and railways at 5%. “How the auto sector embraces sustainability therefore has a deep bearing on the environment,” says Rajesh Kumar Singh, MD of thinkstep in India, a Germany- based sustainability performance measurement company.The auto industry has also been one of the most resource intensive of all economic systems. LCAs help improve resource effi ciency. Look at the resource intensity of a Jaguar XJ car, for instance. Its aluminium content alone is around 527 kg, which corresponds to mining over 2,780 kg of bauxite. If Jaguar Land Rover (JLR,) a Tata company, now wants to use more aluminium recycled from drink cans, it means a lot. Moreover, the energy expended in recycling a kg of aluminium can save nearly 95% of the energy consumed in producing the same quantity of virgin aluminium.A corporate mindset tweaked to design for environment (DfE) is therefore in order. But it’s hard to achieve as Pathak quickly found out. “A design expert is only focused on quality, cost and timelines; environment doesn’t fi gure on the radar at all,” he says. He, therefore, designed training modules for various groups in design — the trims group, the engine group et al. Life-cycle thinking is so ingrained in some of the European automobile manufacturers that at Volkswagen when a new model is planned, the rule is it must consume less fuel and generate lower emissions; raw material use has to be scaled down. Components are expected to be 95% recoverable. Industry watchers claim that Volkswagen resorted to shortcuts and got into ‘software tweaking to cheat on emission norms’ scandal it’s embroiled in today primarily due to its untrammelled ambition to beat Toyota as the world’s largest automobile company and that it had banked on diesel cars to take it there. With $13.5 billion R&D expenditure — that is 5.2% of revenue in 2013 — VW has been one of the world’s top spenders on research. As an innovator, its journey has been long, tortuous, and now controversial.When Pathak took the life-cycle road, the going was tough for him too. He often began his awareness expeditions by explaining LCA and its ‘impact categories’ to members of senior management; the global warming potential, abiotic resource depletion, acidifi cation, eutrophication, and photochemical ozone creation potential. “Eutrophication, what?’ was the refrain. This onslaught of technical language wasn’t taken kindly.Pathak then changed tack and limited himself to carbon footprints. “Carbon emissions are better understood, and appreciated,” says Venkateswaran.Even as Pathak’s team got into the training regimen, they realised cracking LCA was a huge challenge for them too; they had never attempted an analysis before and had no outside consultants to hand-hold them. Having insiders learn and execute LCA by themselves has, in hindsight, apparently worked. JLR had done this at its UK plants too. It was a conscious decision to diffuse LCA awareness across the engineer fraternity rather than bank on specialist LCA practitioners. This apparently embeds knowledge and environmental sensitivities within teams in a more binding manner, making the transition to life-cycle thinking easier and lasting. The exercise began with practice LCAs of small parts at the Pune plant. The bumper of the Vista car supplied by Tata Auto-comp Systems was fi rst selected. Simple excel sheets were used to collate and process data.The effort was then slowly scaled up to fi ve different components; the fuel-rail used in the engine assembly of the Nano, an air-intake manifold, wheel caps, the central fl ap of the world truck and a radiator component. All these components had seen a switch in material used to manufacture them. So, it was a backwards manoeuvre of sorts. LCAs are often used to identify the right material for a component at the design stage itself. Here it was the other way round. The component had been made and was in use. The LCA was done to support the decisions already made.It emerged that emissions in the ‘manufacture’ of the plastic rail, for instance, was quite high compared with emissions in the manufacture of the earlier aluminium alloy rail. Was the move to adopt plastic a flawed one then?However, it was also revealed that emission during the mining and processing of aluminium was also very high. Here, it was the ‘raw material stage’ of aluminium that played spoiler although emission during ‘manufacture’ of the aluminium component was relatively low (see Comparison of Carbon Footprint) On overall comparison, the plastic fuel-rail proved to be a better bet with a 30% reduction in carbon emissions.Meanwhile, Pathak had realised data handling was overwhelming his team. He reached out to his counterparts at JLR in the UK. Many of his data queries were cleared and JLR also suggested he acquire GaBi, a thinkstep LCA software tool. JLR also handed him a bouquet of formulae for conducting ‘rapid’ LCAs.JLR is working towards a target of lowering lifecycle environmental impacts by 30% from a 2007 baseline. Simulation of life- cycle impacts for all its 2017 models are on. The new model of Range Rovers are already 400 kg lighter and sport a smaller fuel-effi cient engine which delivers the same performance as the outgoing model. Its lifecycle global warming potential is down by 13.8%. Armed with the wherewithal, Pathak thought they could take on the big challenge of analysing an entire Tata vehicle.After much deliberation, the Nano was selected. The reasons were many; but the two that clinched the decision was that the Nano had a dedicated production line unlike the other lines. Data collection and analysis becomes easier.The second reason was the fact that almost 70% of the car’s vendors are located in the Sanand vendor park close to the Nano plant. The LCA team temporarily moved to Gujarat for the study as the supply chain and tracking components right to its raw material stage is central to the effort. This was in 2012-13. Here again the team hit a wall.Many vendors, expectedly, were clueless about LCAs. The training and convincing had to start all over again. And when told the company would also like to speak with their suppliers and go deeper into the chain, many vendors turned diffi dent and suspicious. “Are they going to blacklist us; many wanted to know,” recalls Pramod Bodne, MD of Exotech Zanini Industries, a Tata Motors vendor of 20 years. He had to answer probing questions from his suppliers and explain why the exercise was being conducted. Many told him that they were open to any number of quality audits; why study their production processes?During the process, Pathak had to draw out customised data sheets for their key vendors; such was the level of hand-holding. The learnings were huge and numerous hotspots were identifi ed and eventually rectifi ed. For instance, returnable packaging was introduced for an intake manifold transported to Sanand. Polypropylene caps used to cover certain components to prevent ingress of dust were earlier discarded; now they are reused over and over again. “When the exercise was fi nally wrapped up, it was quite a gratifying feeling for me personally as an environment professional,” says Pathak. The lighthearted denouement came later.When the impacts were fi nally presented to his seniors, the questions asked were; so what? Now what? They were clearly not taken in by emissions of the Nano in comparison with published emissions of cars like a Mercedes. The questions were; what is the competition doing? What is the emission of a Hyundai Eon which is closer to Nano in make? Again, it was back to the drawing board. His team eventually drew upon the teardown data of all competitors’ cars they maintain and worked out the emissions for Eon.In 2014, Tata Motors conducted LCAs of several vehicles including the Safari, Ace CNG and the ACE diesel. The quest for building better, greener cars has begun.