Auteur/autrice : Denby Royal

Originally published in Information Enterprise No. 194 (April–June 2025), this English translation features an interview with Peftrust® co-founder Laurent Bocahut and highlights how the company supports one of France’s largest home goods retailers, BUT and Conforama, scale their environmental initiatives.

Using data-driven Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), these companies are not only measuring product impact with unmatched precision—they’re redefining what sustainable product development looks like at scale.

The high-precision environmental impact of products

Reducing the environmental footprint of products is no longer a choice—it’s a necessity. With stricter regulations and consumers demanding greater transparency, companies must find ways to assess and reduce their impact accurately.

Yet, precise measurement remains a complex challenge, largely due to scattered and hard-to-use data. Peftrust® offers an innovative answer to this challenge: a powerful technology that automates Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) at scale—with unmatched precision.

Information Enterprise: Why has Life Cycle Assessment become essential for evaluating a product’s environmental impact?

Laurent Bocahut (CEO, Peftrust®): It all starts with measurement. As the saying goes, you can only reduce what you can measure, and you can only improve what you can evaluate. Until the 2020s, product-level environmental impact wasn’t well quantified. The focus was mostly on corporate footprints, especially carbon reporting.

But over time, it became clear that for companies—fashion brands, for example—around 90% of their impact came from the products themselves. That shifted the key question to: How do we measure that footprint? The answer is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which provides a thorough, reliable view of a product’s environmental profile.

I.E.: Can you explain how Peftrust® addresses this?

Laurent Bocahut: Traditionally, LCA has been performed one product at a time using specialized software—often slow and requiring expert input. But for large retailers like Carrefour, Kiabi, BUT, or Conforama, managing tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs, this isn’t sustainable.

That’s where Peftrust® comes in. Our platform enables companies to perform LCAs at scale—efficiently and dynamically. Unlike traditional tools that offer a static score, our technology evolves with the product, its supply chain, and data sources.

Our real strength? We’re a data-first solution, purpose-built to handle massive datasets and deliver high-precision environmental assessments.

I.E.: How does Peftrust® turn raw company data into meaningful, actionable LCA results?

Laurent Bocahut: Most brands already hold a wealth of data—they just don’t always realise it. It’s scattered across departments like product development, supply chain, ERP systems, and traceability tools.

Our role at Peftrust® is to equip brands with the tools to identify, process, and analyse this data to perform LCAs. Importantly, companies don’t need to pre-format anything. Our system automatically converts and structures the data before sending it to our high-frequency computing engine. Throughout the process, brands retain full control and visibility over their data.

I.E.: What effect does environmental labeling have on consumer behavior?

Laurent Bocahut: It’s becoming a major force for change. Consumer behavior is evolving rapidly, especially in response to eco-scores.

Recent studies show that environmental labeling—similar to the Nutri-Score system in food—significantly influences buying decisions in non-food categories. We’re seeing that roughly 40% of purchasing decisions shift toward products with environmental information, and that trend is even stronger for top-rated items (A or B).

This momentum is being reinforced by regulation. France recently submitted a decree on textile environmental labeling to the EU (February 13), setting the stage for rollout in 2025. Fashion will be the first sector, but there’s already discussion of expanding it to home goods and cosmetics.

At Peftrust®, we’re already supporting our clients through this shift, offering reliable, data-powered eco-design tools tailored to today’s rising consumer expectations.

Client perspective: BUT-Conforama on Eco-Design

What’s driving BUT-Conforama toward eco-design?

Brondon Tchienkoua, Eco-design Project Manager, BUT Conforama Group: BUT and Conforama are two longstanding key players in the French home goods market. Our commitment to the ecological transition reflects our position in the industry. We see this moment as an opportunity—to mobilise the sector, innovate, and reimagine how we do business in line with the future.

The products we put on the market account for over 80% of our Scope 3 carbon footprint. That’s why environmental impact has become a critical factor in how we design and develop our products—to meet the urgent demands of decarbonisation.

How are you measuring and reducing the environmental impact of your products?

B.T: We’ve created an environmental performance benchmark for our products called Habitons Mieux. This method, grounded in Life Cycle Assessment, helps us pinpoint the key areas where eco-design can make a difference, based on defined criteria.

To further this initiative, we’ve partnered with Peftrust® to roll out Life Cycle Assessments at scale across our product range. This collaboration allows us to industrialise the process, bring greater accuracy and regulatory alignment to how we measure environmental impact, and track the tangible benefits of our eco-design efforts.

What are your three keys to success?

B.T: Our three keys to success are :

1/ Engaging our full ecosystem from industrial partners and sourcing teams to internal staff—in the mission to measure and reduce our products’ environmental footprint.

2/ Positioning the BUT-Conforama Group as a responsible leader in the home goods sector.

3/ Staying ahead of regulations by embedding nationally and EU-endorsed best practices into our processes.