Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is a field of active development. The last decade has seen prolific publication of new impact assessment methods covering many different impact categories and providing characterization factors that often deviate from each other for the same substance and impact. Here you can read the journey towards identifying the best existing practice for characterization modeling in life cycle impact assessment.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have captured the imagination of not just the governing bodies they were aimed at, but also of companies and consumers. To meet the growing interest from companies to show their contribution to the SDGs and communicate this to their customers, employees and investors, the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative commenced a project in which PRé and other partners created methodologies to link the SDGs to life cycle assessment (LCA). This allows companies to reliably measure their contributions and impacts and report on specific SDGs. In this article, we will mostly discuss PRé’s approach.

The International Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) is becoming an important format for the LCA community. This data format allows users to exchange data that was previously thought incompatible, bringing many more datasets, models and methods within reach of LCA practitioners. This is a central issue for the LCA community and increasingly important in the context of the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) initiative. Because the ILCD format is very complex, we will use this article to help you become familiar with the basics of ILCD and how to use it for database development.

The European Commission’s Environmental Footprinting (EF) pilot phase has successfully ended. Of the 27 pilot projects, 14 have defined their product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCRs) or organisation environmental footprint sector rules (OEFSRs) for the European market and another 9 aim to do so by October. Now, the PEF method is available for use by anyone who is interested. Read on for a brief review and to see what’s next!

In the testing of the Environmental Footprint Rules, there are many stakeholders involved. It is a well thought governance structure established for a transparent and collaborative framework. This piece aims at describing the governance structure of the EF rules pilot phase.

Every month, one of PRé’s people talks about their personal favorite sustainable initiative. This can be a product or a shop, a local initiative or a new website. This month, João Fontes will tell you a little about initiatives in the sharing economy.

Every month, one of PRé’s people talks about their personal favorite sustainable initiative. This can be a product or a shop, a local initiative or a new website. This month, Caspar Honée will tell you a little about Meewind.

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.