Description

LCA (also known as life cycle analysis) is a methodology for examining environmental impacts associated with all phases of a commercial product’s, processes, or service’s cycle of life. For instance, in the case of a manufactured product, environmental impacts are examined from the extraction and processing of raw materials (cradle) to the product’s creation, distribution, and consumption, and lastly to the recycling or final disposal of the materials used to create the product (grave).

OpenLCA is an open-source program. GreenDelta has been working on it since 2006. It is available for free as open-source software with no license fees. Anyone could access and modify the source code. Businesses use OpenLCA to find opportunities to minimise resource consumption and emissions, improve their company strategy, and make intelligent decisions based on economic and environmental criteria. Furthermore, the software’s open-source nature makes it ideal for managing sensitive data. If the database feature enables it, the software and any models developed can be freely shared.

OpenLCA can be used for several different applications, for example:

• LCA, Life Cycle Costing (LCC), Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA).
• Carbon & water footprints.
• Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).
• The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Design for the Environment label.
• Integrated Product Policy (IPP).

OpenLCA is one of the most comprehensive tools for this purpose accessible today, and several enterprises and NGOs extensively apply it. OpenLCA offers the world’s most extensive collection of data sets and databases for LCA software, with nearly 100,000 different data sets accessible for purchase and free.