Windchill LCA capabilities is a scalable solution for manufacturers to assess environmental performance of products across the entire enterprise. This solution integrates with existing enterprise systems for real-time bill-of-material (BOM) and product data. With Windchill LCA, you can assess the environmental impact of any product or product component throughout the development process and compare it to design alternatives to optimize environmental performance.
The US Department of Energy Argonne National Laboratory has just released a new version of thier GREET model, The Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation Model.
This release of GREET1_2011 model includes the following major updates:
For more details on updates in GREET 1 2011, please download and read the following document:
There are 5 places left for the free training course on ecoEditor for ecoinvent version 3. This is the first time this training is given in French in Europe.
9.15 – 17.30, Wednesday 2 November in Lille (just before the LCA conference 3 & 4 Nov)
More information here: http://www.avnir.org/FR/Programme-120.html
General conference details can be found HERE
The conference is also filling up quickly, so please sign up on the website if you wish to attend.
PE INTERNATIONAL is hosting its annual symposium: a high-profile knowledge-sharing event where sustainability professionals and experts meet to share perspectives, current trends and market opportunities.
This year’s symposium, “Sustainability Across the Value Chain: The Successful Implementation of Strategies” links theory with practice.
Location: Maritim Hotel, Stuttgart, Germany
Date: October 25-27
Highlights:
For more information follow this link: http://www.pe-international.com/academy/symposium-2011/
CLICK IMAGE FOR YOUTUBE DEMO:
PRESS RELEASE:
International product design company, Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC), has just released an Academic version of the LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) Calculator. The LCA Calculator was launched in early 2011 and has had two major corporations sign up for the tool as well as numerous smaller businesses and individuals.
“The LCA Calculator has gone through a stringent Beta version in order to test everything as thoroughly as possible, we have now developed a tool, that to the best of our ability, is completely accurate and will be a successful guide in sustainable design,” says Stephen Knowles, Managing Director of IDC. “With the huge success in sign-ups from both companies and individuals we realised that there was only one gap left to fill: Academic Institutions,” Stephen explains.
IDC was receiving numerous requests from academic institutions as well as individual students, all keen to integrate the tool into their curriculum or field of study. “As a design company we strive to listen to the needs of our clients no matter what they may be, it was no different when requests for an academic version of the LCA Calculator started streaming in,” Stephen explains.
After careful research and many dedicated hours, the LCA Calculator academic version was launched, “Not only have we managed to keep all the applications for the academic version the same and the corporate version, but we also managed to cut the price down to £10 per student for a full year,” Stephen says.
The LCA Calculator is a quick and intuitive way for designers and engineers to understand, analyse and compare environmental impacts of products and particular design decisions. It analyses the effects that a product or service has on the environment over the entire period of its life – from the extraction and processing of raw materials from which it is made – through to the manufacturing, packaging and marketing processes, and the use, re-use and maintenance of the product, and on to its eventual recycling or disposal as waste at the end of its useful life. “If future generations are going to enjoy high quality sustainable products and lifestyles, it is essential that the designers and engineers learn how to use these tools and techniques.”
To find out more about the LCA Calculator or sign up for it go to: www.lcacalculator.com.
YORK, Maine— November 9, 2010 — Earthster today launched the Earthster 2 Turboâ„¢ (E2T) tool pilot program and announced their collaboration with three companies leading in sustainability to create an open, data commons for product designers, manufacturers, suppliers and sustainability experts looking for current information on materials, energy, water, social and climate impacts throughout the product life cycle.Â
During today’s webinar launch with Seventh Generation, Tetra Pak and Walmart, Earthster CEO Greg Norris provided a demonstration of E2T, showing how companies are able to understand where their largest impacts are and how to find more sustainable alternatives. A built-in recommendations engine, drawing on environmental and climate databases, suggests user-specific options for cost-effective improvements of environmental impacts. Social impacts can be identified using the Social Hotspots Database, a resource currently unique to Earthster.
 Walmart contributed funding to the Earthster project to support a number of pilot life cycle assessments (LCAs) of their private brand products. “As companies focus more on the sustainability of products they buy and sell, it’s important to have tools like Earthster available to help track products over their full life cycle†said Jeff Rice, Walmart Sustainability Director. “LCA software that creates value and makes measuring practical improves the effectiveness of reporting standards, like those of the Sustainability Consortium and the Global Packaging Project, especially when those tools are integrated with existing industry platforms like GS1.â€
Seventh Generation has committed to be the first company to use Earthster’s interactive web visualizations to share product sustainability information on its website for two of its product lines. Tetra Pak will be importing a complex set of material and impact options for sustainable packaging options. More companies across a wide range of industries – apparel, food, building materials, automotive, etc. – are sought as additional founding member pilot companies collaborating in user-based tool design and contributing to the data commons.
                                  Consumer information is Seventh Generation’s interest in E2T, according to Dave Rapaport, who leads sustainability for the company.  ”We are excited to have the opportunity to pilot E2T to provide a graphical display of product lifecycle impacts to consumers through our website. We believe strongly in transparency and feel it is our responsibility to help consumers understand the lifecycle environmental and social impacts of the products they buy. We’re thrilled to be a part of the pilot program and expect E2T to become a valuable tool enabling more conscious consumption as well as to offer our supply chain a simple way to track and analyze their impacts.”
                                  According to David Cockburn from Tetra Pak, “E2T gives us and our customers the opportunity to contribute to and benefit from a growing body of knowledge that will help everyone make better decisions in the future.â€
Earthster’s sustainability data commons is being developed to spur product innovation for sustainability. Companies, NGOs, government agencies, and scientists will now be able to analyze and assess the sustainability ‘hotspots’ for products and make adjustments that address both environmental and social concerns. Manufacturers will be able share sustainability-related information with their customers in a radically transparent way. Finally, retailers will be able to deploy E2T across their supply chain, ensuring consistent reporting and data tracking across multiple product categories.
                                  According to Greg Norris, Earthster CEO, “Earthster brings open source software and linked open data into a world which is primarily inhabited right now by proprietary software and data. We’re thrilled to have Walmart, Seventh Generation and Tetra Pak participate in the development of a unique open system where data is being developed in a bottom-up, crowd-sourced, exponentially-increasing way, broadening scope, detail, and the geographic coverage of LCA data resources in the world. We will customize E2Turbo to meet the specific needs of our Group of Ten members during this pilot. Each member will likely utilize E2Turbo in slightly different ways, which also enables them to share best practices and user experiences. Their leadership will provide a system that should truly accelerate sustainable production.â€
About Earthster 2 Turbo
                 Unlike today’s standard LCA tools, Earthster operates as a sustainability wiki, with users having the option to contribute data to a data commons that companies build together. This allows the generation of new data on representative production for a given process or product, filling in data gaps in today’s LCA databases. E2T is optimized to safeguard proprietary, business-sensitive data while at the same time building the data commons.
                                  By passing E2Turbo to suppliers identified as high priorities, a company can quickly understand, using interactive maps and graphics, the greatest share of sustainability-related information in its supply chain. E2T enables companies to get up to speed fast, and to stay on track while rapidly refining their data. Companies receive an initial assessment in seconds, with these results providing focus to the collection of data in-house and from supply chains.Â
                 For roughly 80 percent of the sectors in the U.S. economy, 80 percent of cradle-to-gate impacts are in supply chain, not from the facility. For half the sectors in the economy, this upstream fraction is more than 95 percent. Making changes like energy and materials efficiency improvements within a plant are important, but only part of an innovative sustainability solution. E2Turbo quickly identifies the biggest impacts so that companies can focus on the impacts that matter most.
The other key differentiator with Earthster’s E2T is the integration of social impacts with environmental. From labor rights to working conditions and local community impacts, the social dimension of producing goods and services in global supply chains is layered into E2T analysis and visualizations. Users can then refine their social risk assessment through a supplier self-assessment questionnaire integrated into Earthster, and aligned with the Global Social Compliance Programme.
About Seventh Generation
Seventh Generation is committed to being the most trusted brand of household and personal-care products for your living home. Our products are healthy and safe for the air, the surfaces, the fabrics, the pets, and the people within your home — and for the community and environment outside of it. Seventh Generation also offers products for baby that are safe for your children and the planet.
For information on Seventh Generation cleaning, paper, baby and feminine personal care products, to find store locations, and explore the company’s website visit www.seventhgeneration.com. To read more about Seventh Generation’s corporate responsibility, visit www.seventhgeneration.com/corporate-responsibility/2008.
About Tetra Pak
Tetra Pak is the world’s leading food processing and packaging solutions company. Working closely with our customers and suppliers, we provide safe, innovative and environmentally sound products that each day meet the needs of hundreds of millions of people in more than 170 countries around the world. With almost 22,000 employees based in over 85 countries, we believe in responsible industry leadership and a sustainable approach to business. Our motto, “PROTECTS WHAT’S GOODâ„¢,” reflects our vision to make food safe and available, everywhere. For more information, visit: http://www.tetrapak.com.
About Walmart
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. or “Walmart” serves customers and members more than 200 million times per week at more than 8,400 retail units under 55 different banners in 15 countries. With fiscal year 2010 sales of $405 billion, Walmart employs more than 2 million associates worldwide. A leader in sustainability, corporate philanthropy and employment opportunity, Walmart ranked first among retailers in Fortune magazine’s 2010 Most Admired Companies survey. Additional information about Walmart can be found by visiting http://www.walmartstores.com. Online merchandise sales are available at http://www.walmart.com and http://www.samsclub.com.
About Earthster
Earthster is a project of New Earth, a 501.c.3 charitable organization based in Maine and is the first open source platform to measure and manage a product’s social and environmental impacts throughout the supply chain. Earthster accelerates the global transition to sustainable products and supply chains, by enabling sharing of product sustainability-related information between a manufacturer and its supply chain, its customers, and its other stakeholders, while keeping business-sensitive information confidential. Its flagship offering, Earthster 2 Turbo (E2T), is a Software as a Service (SaaS) system and an open data commons for product designers, manufacturers, suppliers and sustainability experts looking for current information on the climate, energy, water, environmental and social impacts of product life cycles and supply chains.
The US Department of Energy (DOE), National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has just released its baseline LCA model for energy. This model calculates the 2005 national average life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for petroleum-based fuels sold or distributed in the United States in the year 2005. Specifically, the model reports, by life cycle stage, the life cycle GHG emissions for conventional gasoline, conventional diesel fuel, and kerosene-based jet fuel. The model served as the primary calculation tool for the results reported in the NETL November 26, 2008, report entitled “Development of Baseline Data and Analysis of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Petroleum-Based Fuels”. The model was created in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and requires macros to be enabled to solve iterative calculation functions.
A download of the model can be found here: http://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analyses/refshelf/detail.asp?pubID=283
After more than a year of hard work the folks at OpenLCA are proud to release the new version of openLCA, beta 1.1:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openlca/
You will find there a version for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Maybe this is the first LCA software that runs “directly” on Mac and Linux.
They have also released the full source code, at the same location.
Installation is straightforward, as is also described in the release notes available at the given location; the release notes describe also hard- and software requirements that should be met by most modern computers.
Some of the features of openLCA 1.1:
- graphical modelling of Life Cycle Assessments
- goal and scope, inventory, impact assessment, and interpretation are covered
- import of all data in EcoSpold format
- parameters on various levels, from process to project
- uncertainty calculation & simulation
- allocation, also on the flow level; system expansion
- fast database, client/server structure -> openLCA can run on a desktop and in a client server environment
- help included in the application
- a nice and clean user interface
- modularity of the software, which is now able to deal with various plugins / modules …
Compared to the previous release, it is now possible to model very large systems with several thousand processes, in a fluent manner. OpenLCA can be used with ecoinvent version 2 or 2.1
This is a HUGE step to making LCA more accessible to a broader group of LCA practitioners!
For more information on the OpenLCA project, visit their website here: www.openlca.org