
Written by Målbar Team
Ask most product developers where a product’s climate footprint sits, and they will point to the material: the steel, the glass, the ceramic body. Rarely to the bag it ships in.
That is exactly the kind of detail a life cycle assessment is built to catch, and exactly the kind of detail nobody thinks to question until someone actually calculates it.
Rosendahl Design Group, home to eight design brands spanning porcelain, glass, textiles, steel and plastic, found this out when customer demand for documented climate data pushed the company to calculate its first 50 products using Målbar LCA.
“That cotton bag, which was really just an accessory to the product, accounted for over half of the CO2eq emissions. It was a huge insight, and everyone was sort of: ‘we didn’t see that coming.'” – Maja Louise Christensen, Product Developer, Rosendahl Design Group
The bag had accompanied a range of painted products as protective packaging for years, without anyone questioning it.

Once the number was on the table, the team switched it for a different material, one of several material decisions the data has since overturned or confirmed.
The calculation work now runs across all eight of Rosendahl’s product developers, and a Målbar LCA screening is a required checkpoint before any product is cleared for production.
Read the full case to see how a cotton bag turned into a standing rule for material decisions at Rosendahl Design Group, and what the company is doing now with the rest of its back catalogue.



