AkzoNobel: Eco-effciency assessments in investment decisions

In AkzoNobel all new investments require a preceding appropriation request (AR). The responsibility for approving the AR depends on the scope and size. Smaller investments are decided upon within the departments.  The ARs for all investments exceeding 5 million Euro go to the Board of Management and require an Eco-efficiency assessment to be made according to the general guidelines. These Eco-effciency assessments are based on Life Cycel Assessment and guide can be found under Getting started guides.

The EEA is included in the AR in order to secure that all new investment are done in line with the AkzoNobel strategy.

The Eco-efficiency assessment can be done by the investment project team if they have the competence. Several business units are building up the competence and databases to be able to perform the Eco-efficiency assessment in the future. Still, it is common to let the AkzoNobel Sustainability team perform the assessment with input from the project team, usually the project manager and project technical manager.

Since an eco-efficiency assessment is always a comparison, it is essential that the alternatives are relevant and comparable. The data collection follows the standard procedure for all EEA, but many times limited amount of data is available due the fact that it is a new investment, and estimations then needs to be made.

For the most useful result, it is best to start the EEA in an early stage of the investment procedure when several options are still in the process. The EEA then has the possibility to show which of the alternatives is the most eco-efficicent which will avoid decisions beeing made on the wrong premise.