Life Cycle Assessment for a credit card company will allow our client to potentially reduce by 70% their carbon footprint.

Hands on Impact conducted a Life Cycle Assessment for a credit card multinational manufacturer, which results highlighted many operational improvements allowing potentially their carbon footprint to be massively reduced by 70%. 

What are the main impacts in manufacturing credit cards?

the analysis included the entire life cycle and, due to their importance, four areas were further explored: material supply, energy consumption during manufacturing, transportation towards the final client and waste treatment of the product. 

3 potential improvements to reduce credit cards’ environmental impact were found: 

• Procurement of recycled basic materials (Mainly PVC).
• Energy consumption optimization, switching it to renewable sources and tracking it during the manufacturing stage.
• Improvement of logistic chains in all stages.
• Avoid landfill.

How to reduce the impacts?

Only by changing PVC and aluminum for recycled materials and setting up solar panels, they can reduce their carbon footprint by 27% versus current practices. 

Another key finding is that these analysis conclusions and recommendations can be leveraged and applied to every kind of plastic card: banking, ID, security, transportation, loyalty etc. Moreover, this analysis provided 3 alternative solutions to avoid its transfer to landfill, which are: surface and easy treatments for re-use, research of second use of the card for other industries, and recycling of the components.