Tools for life cycle assessment
We provide guidance on how to perform life cycle assessment consistent with scientific standards and technical guidelines and also contribute to the development of tools and LCA software for the LCA practitioner. Targets are speed and precision.
Projects
- Dairy Climate Check Tool
In this project we collaborated with Arla to build the Climate Check Tool, used by farmers to assess their carbon footprint. - Quantifying Sustainable Impact Pathways
This project places each of the 169 targets of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into a comprehensive, quantified and operational impact pathway framework. - Wastewater LCI Initiative
Do you need to model in your LCA studies the environmental impact of wastewater, or of specific chemicals present in wastewater? The Wastewater LCI Initiative by 2.-0 LCA consultants has led to the development of WW LCI, an Excel-based model that calculates life cycle inventories for urban wastewater discharges in more than 100 countries. - LCA Tool for Danish Horticulture March 2024
The aim of this project was to provide Danish Horticulture with an LCA tool for primary producers in Denmark. The tool was designed to include all relevant crops produced in Danish horticulture. - LCA Tool for Danish Crown June 2023
The aim of this project was to provide a proprietary LCA tool in relation to the production of pork and beef at farm gate and at slaughterhouse gate. - Mapping Business Impacts on the UN SDGs November 2022
This project placed each of the 169 targets of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into a comprehensive, quantified and operational impact pathway framework. This project is being continued in the LCSA project. - Social Life Cycle Assessment December 2021
Over the years 2.-0 LCA consultants have contributed to the methodology development for social LCA, especially pointing out the close parallels with the biophysical LCA framework, and contributing to quantification of the social impact pathways with impact categories, indicators, and characterisation factors. - Monetary Valuation of Environmental Impacts in Life Cycle Assessment November 2013
A literature review and benchmarking of monetary valuation methods and their applications in LCA, and a web-based survey of the extent of use and opinions on monetary valuation methods among LCA practitioners. - Plastberegner – LCA of Plastics September 2012
This tool was publicly available and enabled a calculation of the environmental effects of plastic products using a life cycle approach. See also this publication. - Biodiversity Indicators for Forest Management in LCA context February 2008
The objective of the study was to review existing proposals for biodiversity indicators for forest management, placing the indicators within a common framework. - Environmental Improvement Potentials of Meat and Dairy Products November 2007
This project applies several novel elements at the same time, such as hybrid LCA, consequential modelling, rebound effects, social impacts, life cycle costs, analysis of synergies and dysergies, impact assessment with full monetarisation, temporal discounting, and policy feasibility assessment. - Holiwast June 2007 and closed 2017
The Holiwast Decision Support Tool was a web-based tool that allowed simultaneous comparisons of up to five stakeholder views or scenarios of municipal waste management policies. - ISO Standardisation
We play an active role in supplying expert delegates to the ISO TC 207 / SC5 on life cycle assessment and several other related Techical Committees. - Indirect Land Use Change Model (iLUC)
How to model of indirect land use change (iLUC) in LCA? The iLUC Club develops and further refines a generic, simple and science-based model for including iLUC in LCA.
Rules of thumb for system descriptions
Correct system description is crucial to obtain correct results. We have therefore focused on providing detailed guidance on how to ensure an appropriate description of the product to be assessed, and how to determine appropriately the processes to include in a product system. The guidance documents contain decision trees and default rules of thumb to be used in situations of limited knowledge. This speeds up the making of well-documented system descriptions. Some say that our scientific background report makes even better reading than the guidance documents. A more recent short introduction is found in Weidema B P, Ekvall T, Heijungs R (2009) · Guidelines for applications of deepened and broadened LCA. (Deliverable D18 of work package 5 of the CALCAS project). The method has now also been applied in the consequential system model of version 3 of the ecoinvent database. We have been deeply involved in the making of the ecoinvent consequential system model.
Precision tools
Assessments of the data and modelling uncertainty allows us to quickly focus further efforts on the main causes of uncertainty – not wasting time on issues of minor importance. We have developed the pedigree tool to estimate data uncertainty from data quality – a tool now used by the leading database provider Ecoinvent and integrated in the leading LCA software SimaPro. We have developed uncertainty estimates for input-output data, and use Monte Carlo simulations for uncertainty assessments and contribution analysis. The use of different tools for uncertainty analysis are described in the following publications: Reducing uncertainty in LCI, An integrated approach to uncertainty assessment in LCA, and Uncertainty reduction in consequential LCA models.
Impact assessment
We let you have the best of two worlds: Quick and unambiguous results at the push of a button, drawing together the complexity of social, environmental, and economic impacts into a single score, while still having the option of analysing each small contribution to the result in detail, and without sacrificing completeness.
Our ambition is to ensure that all important impact categories are included in our assessments. We have therefore developed impact assessment methods for nature occupation – covering the physical impacts of land use – and injuries (simplified methods are included in our Stepwise impact assessment method). Two important impact categories are still waiting to be included, namely noise and invasive alien species, both mainly related to transport activities. Our most recent achievement has been to place social and economic impacts in a life cycle context, using the same system delimitation, data collection procedures, and impact assessment endpoints for social and economic impacts as for environmental impacts. Our method thereby brings together the best of LCA and cost-benefit analyses.
The aggregation of all impact categories into a single score is based on the pioneering work of the Ecoindicator99 of PRé consultants, which operates with three endpoints (human health, ecosystem and resources). In our Stepwise impact assessment method, we have carried this work further, by finding a way to express the three endpoints in a single unit, namely QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years). QALYs may alternatively be expressed in monetary units, thus allowing a full monetarisation of the results from life cycle assessments.
LCA software
We contribute to the development of LCA software. In particular, we recommend the SimaPro software to our customers, due to its ease of use, strong result analysis features, and its speedy calculation of the large matrices. Matrix calculation is a necessity to get the most out of the modern hybrid and input-output based databases. We develop tailor-made interfaces according to customer requirements as well as web-based and educational software. For an example of our web-applications, see our decision support tool Holiwast for LCA in waste management.