Beginner's Guide: How To Do An LCA For FREE, Life Cycle Assessment Tools And Data Embedding sustainability intelligence into business decision-making is not only a forward-thinking strategy that improves humankind's relationship to the environment, but is a strategy to ensure a business's viability in today's rapidly evolving landscape. In this new 'environment,' businesses have a leg up if they understand how their operations and supply chain relationships hurt and help the planet. Such intelligence can augment decisions about procurement, marketing, design, supplier and customer relationships, and in the office. These decisions can include sourcing materials that reduce upstream impacts on the environment, to marketing environmental performance of your services, or even having the credibility to be able to influence policy that affects your industry.

But such 'sustainability intelligence' is not easy to come by, and can involve hiring costly consultants who have the data and know the methodologies and standards. But the fact that the environmental consultants' skills are cryptic and expensive becomes a barrier to helping businesses infuse this intelligence into their everyday decisions, and ultimately becomes a barrier to a more sustainable future. I would therefore like to share some of what I have learned as a consultant, so that you can appreciate that my craft does not need to be rocket science, and can take small steps that have a large impact, at a very low cost, and that can even be fun! In the remainder of this article I will cover the following three areas that will help you conduct a low cost life cycle assessment. Strategize: The most important part of this whole process is to make sure you are asking a strategically important question. Something that will benefit your business in the long term and not simply result in a lot of wasted time doing analysis.

This means planning a study in an iterative fashion and taking steady action, so that insight can be gained along the way. Measure: Once we've defined an important, strategic question, how do we go about answering that question and measuring the associated impacts? I will show you how doing an LCA can actually be very cheap, and even free of cost! Integrate: Finally I present a list of free tools and free, quality data sources that will provide a resource to integrate life cycle thinking into your organization. STRATEGIZE: Ask the right question Before embarking on the quest for the sustainability grail, the most important first step is to make sure your objectives are clear. This not only dictates exactly what kind of information is collected and what analysis is to be performed, but it can also prevent a lot of wasted time along with ensuring that your time and money are spent efficiently. Exactly why does your company wish to understand their environmental impacts in greater depth?

Here are some common motivations, all which involve very different approaches.

You can view this archived webinar now on-demand. The Renewable Fuels Standards require greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting for biomass based biofuels to ensure biofuel production will reduce GHG emissions as compared to petroleum based fuels. Biofuel GHG emissions and environmental impacts can be determined using a framework called life cycle assessment (LCA). This framework provides a common method for analysts and is documented in the ISO 14044 LCA standard.

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Biofuel production requires many different material inputs and produces a wide range of emissions that can be difficult to track and quantify often requiring the use of LCA software. OpenLCA software is an open source and free software that can be used to model life cycle emissions and impacts of biofuels and bioenergy. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has developed an LCA data submission application that will allow data formatted in openLCA to be submitted and disseminated through the USDA LCA Commons.

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The goal of this webinar is to: 1. Introduce LCA and how it can help quantify environmental impacts 2. Create an understanding of the interactions between openLCA and preexisting datasets 3.

Introduce the audience to the LCA Commons data entry tool 4. Communicate the benefits of using the LCA Commons data entry tool and openLCA 5. Demonstrate the capabilities of openLCA 4.0. (5351Kb) Need Help! For information on connecting to the webinar or setting up YouTube - Embedded Video, please check out the section. If you continue to have issues connecting to the webinar or if you're having trouble with this website, contact us at. If this webinar is a standard portable media file format such as (.mp4,.avi,.mov,.flv) or a Microsoft Windows Media File (.wmv), you will need to have the Windows Media Player, Apple Quick Time Player, Real Player or other media player installed on your computer to view/play the webinar file.

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