Authors: Julien Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Bayart, Blanche Dalimier, Charlotte Stalder

There is a version of sustainability work that ends with a report. A consultant runs the numbers, produces a document with a cover page and an executive summary, and the company files it away. The insight is real, but without anyone inside the organization who understands what it means or how to act on it, nothing actually changes. 

We’ve spent over 20 years doing lifecycle assessment and carbon footprinting, and we’ve learned what shifts organizations and what doesn’t. A study alone rarely does it. What changes organizations is when the people inside them — designers, procurement managers, marketers, directors — understand enough to make the right call themselves, without waiting for the next consultant report. 

That’s why we train. And that’s what this article is about. 

A word about who we are and what we actually do 

We want to say something directly, because we hear it often enough that it’s worth addressing: EA does a lot more than plastics research. 

Yes, plastic pollution, marine litter and water footprinting are part of our history and remain part of our work. But we are, at our core, a lifecycle thinking organization. We do LCA. We do carbon and water footprinting. We assess environmental impacts across supply chains, products, and strategies, across sectors including energy, luxury goods, telecommunications, and higher education. We support companies in making sense of the CSRD landscape, in structuring their climate roadmaps, and in building the internal capacity to use environmental data as a decision-making tool. 

If you’ve thought of us primarily as a plastics shop, we’d invite you to look again. 

The real reason companies come to us for training 

When companies ask us for LCA training, the surface request is usually something like “we want our team to understand lifecycle assessment.” But the underlying need is almost always the same. 

“Companies usually want to compare options between products, materials, or suppliers, but they don’t fully trust their intuition yet,” explains Blanche Dalimier, LCA expert at EA. “There is also a strong need to understand where impacts really come from and to communicate about them in a credible way.” 

Julien Boucher, co-founder of EA and head of research, puts it plainly: “A study you commission gives you an answer. But if nobody inside the organization understands what that answer means, nothing changes.” 

The three reasons companies choose training over simply buying another study, according to our experts: 

• To gain autonomy. 
  When your team understands LCA, you stop being dependent on external consultants to interpret results or reframe questions. You build the capacity to ask better questions internally, earlier in the process. 

• To make sure results actually drive decisions. 
  “LCA is not only a reporting exercise, it’s a decision-making tool,” says Dalimier. “The earlier it is integrated into projects, the more useful it becomes.” A trained product designer integrates environmental criteria from the first sketch. An untrained one waits for the audit. 

• To communicate with confidence. 
  As customer demands for environmental data grow and regulatory scrutiny of green claims intensifies, the ability to speak credibly about environmental impact is no longer optional. Teams that have been through a solid LCA training can defend their claims. Those who’ve only read about it often can’t. 

What teams get wrong before they’ve been trained 

One of the most consistent things we observe in training rooms is that teams arrive with strong intuitions, and those intuitions are frequently wrong. 

“The most persistent misconception is around waste and circularity,” says Boucher. “People tend to assume that because something is circular, it’s automatically better. But circularity is a means, not an end. LCA is what lets you actually verify whether it reduces impact or just moves it somewhere less visible.” 

Dalimier points to another pattern she sees regularly: “Most teams already know carbon footprinting, so they assume LCA is just a more complicated version of that. But carbon alone doesn’t capture land use, water stress, biodiversity impacts, or the emissions linked to biological systems, and these are all areas where practitioner experience really matters.” 

There’s also a consistent surprise around where the real difficulty in LCA actually sits. “Everyone expects to struggle with the calculation,” says Boucher. “What actually challenges people is the scoping: defining the functional unit, framing the right question, setting the system boundary. Get that wrong and the rest is meaningless, regardless of how precise your data is.” 

Some of the most powerful moments in training come from numbers that break prior assumptions entirely. As Dalimier notes: “Gold has an impact of around 50,000 kg CO2 per kg. That figure alone changes how teams think about material choices in ways no amount of conceptual explanation ever could.” 

Who benefits most and why 

LCA literacy isn’t equally valuable across all functions. Our experts have a clear view on where it creates the most leverage. 

• Product design teams benefit because they can integrate environmental criteria at the concept stage, before choices become locked in. This is where LCA has the highest leverage and the lowest cost of change. 

• Procurement teams benefit because they can evaluate suppliers and materials using environmental data, not just price and quality. In a world where scope 3 reporting pressure is moving down supply chains rapidly, this is becoming a baseline competence. 

• Marketing and communications teams benefit because they can make robust environmental claims and avoid the legal and reputational risks of claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny. The EU Green Claims Directive is sharpening this requirement considerably. 

• Leadership teams benefit because they can evaluate strategic trade-offs using quantified environmental insights, rather than relying on instinct or delegating entirely to specialists. 

Case Study: Travel Sentry— Training an entire organization together 

When TSI, a luggage security company decided to build sustainability competence, they made a deliberate choice: don’t train just the people who “need to know.” Train everyone. 

“As a 20-person organization, we had the opportunity to move together,” explains a company representative. “We wanted every single person, from the CEO to individual contributors, to have the minimum skillset to be genuinely involved in our shift toward sustainability, and to be able to represent that commitment externally.” 

The training covered climate impact fundamentals: understanding carbon, emissions scopes, and how to think about organizational footprint. But what the company highlights most isn’t the content, it’s what the format made possible. 

“It created a rare space where hierarchy didn’t matter. We were all newcomers to the topic, learning side by side. The CEO and employees discussed a complex topic together in a space where no one was the expert. That kind of conversation is rare and valuable.” 

The shared experience became the foundation for everything that followed: external stakeholder engagement, new cross-cutting sustainability projects, and the confidence for the whole team to speak credibly about the organization’s commitments. 

“They gave us not just the knowledge, but the space and the format to build a real shared commitment across the whole team, something an off-the-shelf course simply wouldn’t have created.” 

What this shows: for small organizations, whole-team training isn’t a luxury. It’s often the most efficient path to real organizational change, because the alignment you build in the room is as valuable as the content itself. 

Case Study: A Major Luxury Goods Group — Opening the Black Box of LCA 

When a major luxury watchmaking group came to us, they had clear ambitions: use environmental assessment as a strategic tool, understand where the main hotspots lie across their product portfolio, and build an approach to LCA at scale suited to the extraordinary complexity of watchmaking. 

The challenge was significant. A luxury watch can contain more than 500 components, involving highly specialized materials and manufacturing processes specific to each Maison. Existing LCA databases are not always detailed or representative enough to capture that complexity. 

“Before the training, many participants perceived LCA as a kind of black box,” explains Jean-Baptiste Bayart, LCA expert at EA who led the engagement. “One of the key outcomes was to demystify the methodology by explaining how it works in practice, from the underlying modelling logic and assumptions to the role of databases and calculation tools.” 

The training brought together participants from product design, ESG/sustainability, and industrialization teams, bridging two worlds of expertise that rarely speak the same language: watchmaking know-how and environmental analysis. Beyond the technical content, the sessions opened broader conversations about why companies invest in sustainability, how environmental priorities connect with business objectives, and how to balance sustainability ambitions with operational constraints. 

One important outcome was the realization that building robust sector-specific environmental data is a pre-competitive challenge, reinforcing the value of collaborative industry initiatives like Watchmaking Ecodesign. 

What this shows: building LCA competence in a highly specialized industry isn’t just about learning a methodology. It’s about bridging two forms of expertise so that the right questions can be asked, and the right answers trusted. 

Case Study: From Climate Ambition to Actionable Roadmap 

A distribution system operator (DSO) came to us with what Charlotte Stalder, environmental consultant at EA, describes as “a strategic paradox rather than a single decision”: how to reduce its own emissions while expanding the infrastructure and services that enable its customers to decarbonize. 

This was not a training in the traditional sense, but a full decision-support process, structured around 6 workshops, 15 expert evaluation sessions and 7 leadership validation sessions, involving around 45 participants from across the organization. 

“Leadership already had clear climate ambitions and targets. What shifted was their understanding of how interconnected and complex the levers were. What initially seemed like a technical topic actually required navigating trade-offs between growth, costs, operations and emissions.” 

The key moment came when complexity turned into clarity: approximately 190 ideas were structured into 45 prioritized actions, allowing teams to clearly see what to do next. 

“A central question was how to grow while reducing emissions. We reframed this not as a contradiction, but as a system to optimize, making trade-offs explicit through structured analysis and enabling informed decision-making.” 

The outcome was 45 priority actions, operational roadmaps for each business unit, and the integration of climate strategy into governance — along with a strengthened ability to make faster, more confident decisions in a genuinely complex environment. 

“We helped transform a complex climate challenge into a clear, shared and actionable roadmap, enabling leadership to move from ambition to implementation with confidence.” 

What this shows: supporting leadership on sustainability is not primarily about classroom training. It is about facilitating a structured thinking process that translates strategic ambition into operational reality, using a format tailored to the actual challenge rather than a standard curriculum. 

Why SMEs specifically, and why now 

The pressures that used to land only on large corporations are moving down supply chains at speed. SMEs increasingly receive requests from customers to provide environmental data, and regulatory requirements around CSRD, the Green Claims Directive, and scope 3 reporting are creating expectations that extend well beyond listed companies. 

The fog around what all of this actually requires is real, and it’s a source of anxiety for many SME leadership teams. Part of what we do in training is lift that fog: helping teams understand why these tools exist, not just how to use them. 

The good news is that even modest training investment creates significant capacity. As Dalimier puts it: “Even with limited time and budget, understanding system boundaries, identifying hotspots, and knowing that carbon alone is not enough already makes a big difference.” 

Funding: more accessible than most companies realise 

For companies based in the Canton of Vaud, there is a concrete funding pathway worth knowing about. 

VivaVaud, the sustainability platform backed by the Canton and its main economic actors, co-finances projects aimed specifically at raising awareness, informing, and training the decision-makers of Vaud SMEs on sustainability topics. The target audience is explicitly directors, managers, entrepreneurs, founders, and board members. Projects can receive co-financing of up to CHF 50,000. 

This means that sustainability training for your leadership or cross-functional team may be significantly co-funded. If you are a Vaud-based SME and have been waiting for the right moment to invest in this kind of capacity-building, the funding landscape is more favourable than most organisations realise. We’re happy to help you think through how to approach it. 

Where this is heading 

The regulatory and market landscape is not stabilising. The complexity is increasing, and the expectations on companies of all sizes are growing alongside it. 

“In the next few years,” says Dalimier, “companies will need stronger capacity to interpret several indicators at once, integrate LCA earlier in product design, and connect environmental impacts with supply-chain decisions and business risks.” 

Boucher is direct about what he believes the role of a firm like EA should be in this: “Real impact doesn’t happen in consulting reports. It happens inside organizations, in the decisions made by product designers, procurement teams, marketers, and leadership. Our role is to transfer the right knowledge to the right people so they can make the right call inside their organization. That’s what we mean when we talk about moving from footprint to handprint. You can’t do that alone. You have to build it into the companies you work with.” 

Is it time to train your team? 

A few questions worth considering: Can your team respond credibly when a key client asks for a product carbon footprint, or do you rely on a consultant every time? Does your procurement team have the tools to evaluate environmental claims from suppliers? If your marketing team makes a sustainability claim, can they explain the methodology behind it? Does your leadership team understand the regulatory environment well enough to make strategic decisions with confidence? 

If any of these questions prompt a pause, a conversation is probably worth having. 

We offer tailored LCA and sustainability training for SMEs and larger organizations, from half-day awareness sessions to multi-workshop capability-building programmes for cross-functional teams. Every engagement is designed around your specific context, your team’s starting point, and the decisions you actually need to make. 

Reach out to contact@e-a.earth to start a conversation. 

Earth Action has been working at the intersection of environmental science and business decision-making for over 20 years. Our work spans lifecycle assessment, carbon and water footprinting, environmental strategy, and sustainability training, across sectors including energy, luxury goods, technology, and higher education.