Scientific insight is continuously improving, providing us with information that helps our impact assessment calculations be more accurate and better able to predict environmental impacts and how much our products contribute to climate change.

Great news for users of the pedigree matrix uncertainty in ecoinvent. The pedigree approach to deriving uncertainty factors has been refined, now providing uncertainty factors based on empirical data.

LCA experts have been conducting sustainability assessments for a long time, but they were mostly focused on environmental impacts. Most practitioners did not have the tools to assess the social impacts or social risks associated with their products.

Environmental footprint assessment is a highly detailed technical tool for evaluating the environmental performance of products or organizations. This level of technical detail, however, often makes it difficult for sustainability professionals to give decisive answers to decision-makers.

Life cycle hotspot analysis can help confirm your intuition or lead you to new insights towards determining a robust sustainability strategy. This article gives a view on how to make detailed and complex hotspot analysis in life cycle assessment (LCA) clear to everyone involved.

Worldwide, about 25% of all life cycle assessments are related to the agri-food sector. Good databases such as Agri-footprint therefore have a substantial impact. Agri-footprint has been available to the LCA community since May 2014. In December 2015, Agri-footprint 2.0 will be made available in SimaPro.

One reason why we care about the environmental impact of our choices is that they affect human health. But how do you quantify that? The most commonly used metric is Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY), taking into account the years lost to premature death and expressing the reduced quality of life due to illness in years as well. How can you use this in life cycle assessment and what are the points of contention you should be aware of?

In a circular economy, the intention is to produce no waste or pollution. Instead, products, parts and materials are used, cared for, repaired, reused and recycled as much as possible. This requires new and innovative approaches to business, and assessment methods such as LCA to measure the effect. In our circular economy miniseries, we’ll address five ways to apply the circular economy in your business. Today: reusing waste.

To ensure comparability within products groups, the PEF initiative is facilitating the use of life cycle inventory data. The Energy and Transport data constitutes the first data lot. This is a short update on the availability of this first building block towards consistent EF-compliant data.

A water footprint is a measure of how much water your business uses and which direct and indirect environmental impacts result from this. It can help you understand and manage your water use and even protect your company from physical, regulatory and reputation risks, adding a valuable and actionable dimension to your environmental KPIs.