The pilot phase of the Environmental Footprinting Initiative is over. What’s next? The period before any policies regarding product and organization environmental footprinting are adopted is a transition phase, with a focus on monitoring implementation and getting new developments started.

Despite the unusual year 2020 turned out to be, there have still been plenty of interesting developments in impact assessment methodologies: on toxicity impacts, particulate matter health impacts, water use impacts, marine impacts, elemental resource scarcity, compaction and water erosion impacts on agricultural soils, and planetary and regional boundaries. This article was written by Laura Golsteijn with contributions from Peter Fantke, Christopher Oberschelp, Anne-Marie Boulay, Rickard Arvidsson, Thomas Sonderegger, and Anders Bjørn.

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?

Part I of this article series explained why companies might want to monetise sustainability, expressing impacts in monetary value to make them more tangible. This part shows the steps required to do monetisation, and discusses the drawbacks and advantages.

The LCA community proudly strives to cover everything in their assessments: wide system boundaries, the whole lifecycle of a product and many different environmental impact categories. That means that sustainability practitioners have to be able to talk about concepts like eutrophication, photochemical ozone formation, acidification and ecotoxicity. You probably know the meaning of the words, but do you know what it means for the planet? Why is it bad? What causes it? Should we be worried? This series will give you the information you need to work with these concepts in your sustainability efforts. Today’s topic: eutrophication.

Today’s topic in our obscure impact series: ionizing radiation. We have all heard of it, but what is it really? What can we do about it? And how should we account for it in our life cycle assessments? With this series, PRé contributes to the goal of the LCA community to cover everything in their assessments, including impacts that are not directly top of mind for most people.