Analysing a product’s lifecycle, while crucial, is often perceived as a slow, expensive process. This is where Holis and its dedicated platform come in. Its mission is to drastically reduce the time and cost required to carry out these analyses. Companies can now trace, quantify, improve and communicate the socio-environmental performance of all their products efficiently. The company’s young cofounder, Martin Besnier, came to present his greentech at Nexus Luxembourg.

Paperjam: What’s in it for you?

Martin Besnier: Until now, there were expert tools that could only be used by consultants. In terms of experience, it’s a bit like doing your taxes on Windows 95. It’s very complicated and you don’t want to do it! So our approach at Holis was to ask ourselves: what can we automate into something smoother, faster and more efficient? We worked with hundreds of different users, experts, students, textile professionals, representatives of the European Commission… and oO that basis, we created our platform with a unique approach.

How can your platform make things easier for a company?

Let’s take the example of a T-shirt. The company knows what it’s made of and where it comes from. But these two elements are not enough to analyse the life cycle of the T-shirt. So our platform will enable the company to measure the impact over the entire life cycle. We start with the data that the company has, and then our platform will generate major hypotheses, like a digital twin. If data is missing, the analysis will remain vague, but the company will still have some elements to start with. It can then decide on measures to improve. On the platform, there are also eco-design and eco-selection tools so that the brand can do things differently (and better).

How do you collect this data?

There are three ways to do it. The first is manual input, which can work on a project that is still at the R&D innovation stage where there is no data anywhere. This also applies to small companies that don’t necessarily have an internal data system. The second way is to connect to an ERP or PLM system. You can then make the most of all the data that is already stored for the company, and this can be done en masse. For example, Intersport, one of our customers, has several thousand products that will be integrated automatically. We can do this by import or by API, depending on the data. And the third way regards data that doesn’t actually exist and that the company doesn’t know about. This is data required from suppliers, which is sometimes necessary because there are regulations that require us to go back up the value chain. For such cases, we have a collection platform.

Although the CSRD and CSDDD directives have been postponed, do you sense a growing awareness on the part of companies?

Yes, we can see that things are moving despite this. But the interest goes beyond regulation. For a company, the benefits of environmental scoring are manifold and there are many possible uses. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is multi-criteria and not just about carbon. It can also be used to analyse impacts on water, air, traffic, people, etc. But LCA can also have a use in R&D, because when you’ve piloted a project and want to set environmental specifications for it, being able to have modelling from the outset--even if it’s crude--allows you avoid focusing on something that seems significant but may not be.

What does that mean?

Here’s an example: we had a customer in the household appliances sector for whom, at the start of the project, the objective was to use recycled plastic for the casing of their appliance. When we did the pre-modelling, we quickly realised that there were elements, particularly on heating, that were extremely impactful. In the end, the priority was more on the choice of technologies to reduce this impact than on the recycled plastic itself.

LCAs are also of interest from a marketing point of view, as there is now a segment of the population that is increasingly concerned about and keen to promote good products, and which may find it difficult to find their way around the numerous labels, for example, whose specifications are not always known. So the idea is to have a more objective metric. This can also be an element of differentiation for a company.

At what stage in the product development process do you get involved?

This can be during the product development phase, but also later on. Our customers who have been with us for two years are starting to adopt a comparative approach, year after year, to measure their progress. So beyond the product development phase, LCA can be used to initiate thinking that goes further, that questions the business model in a general way. We’re talking here about time-consuming transitions, but we enable these companies to draw up scenarios and test them. We include environmental and social metrics in our analysis, as well as cost. And we’re increasingly starting to incorporate risk because, to lead to decisions, it’s not enough to say: “It’s good for the environment so let’s go for it.”

This article was originally published in French.