As LCA becomes a more globally important and accepted way of measuring our environmental impacts and quantifying sustainability in business, we will have to face our many problems.

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.

LCA has existed for several decades now. But still, there are no clear standards for technical issues, such as substance nomenclature and data quality in LCA, among other. Every now and then, initiatives arise with a new passion to tackle this problem. Right now, several powerful initiatives are doing just that. This article explores the status quo of LCA data standards at this moment, and shows you the latest developments in changing it.

Normally I dislike stereotypes and get pretty bored with trite assumptions about Italians (I am Italian, for the record), so it feels a bit like scoring an own goal to talk about food and the ability – my ability – to recognize a really good meal and to know what it means to prepare one. But since this column talks about data collection and its role in LCA studies, you will agree that the link with food is pretty automatic, right?

Biodiversity refers to the variety of organisms present in an ecosystem, or the genetic variation within an area. This diversity is necessary for many ecosystems and human systems services, either directly (for example, agricultural activities) or indirectly (for example local temperature regulation or natural filtering and cleaning of water streams). For that reason, we need to make sure we protect our planet’s biodiversity and to do so we need to know the impacts of our actions on it.

SIMAPRO PARTNER STORY | A global vision and a demand for high quality life-cycle information led to the creation of Danish sustainability firm, 2.-0 LCA Consultants

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.

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.