6 Mar 2018
LCA database update
Release of Agri-footprint 4.0
The Agri-footprint LCA database for agri-food processes and products is under continuous development. Since its release in 2014 the database has been expanded by adding high quality data, making Agri-footprint an increasingly valuable source of information for experts working on environmental assessments of agri-food products. It is therefore not surprising that the database is highly valued by the food industry, LCA experts, the scientific community and government authorities. This summer we released Agri-footprint 3.0 in SimaPro. We have also made the database available in openLCA, an open source LCA software. Recently an update (Agri-footprint 4.0) has been released in SimaPro (and soon in openLCA). This update includes USDA LCA Commons crop production data and some bug fixes.
USDA LCA Commons Life Cycle Inventory data
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) hosts a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data repository called LCA Commons. The objective of this repository is to assist researchers by providing agricultural LCA datasets. The LCA Commons programme supports access, transparency, reuse and collaboration among researchers. Currently, these data are available via openLCA, but USDA wants to distribute data through other outlets as well in order to reach more researchers.When integrating the LCA Commons data into Agri-footprint we also modified and restructured the data in close cooperation with the USDA. For example, we simplified the inventories by aggregating some of the field activities, linked activity data to relevant background datasets, and calculated and added relevant elementary flows. Finally, the data have been restructured to align better with the Agri-footprint structure. During our restructuring activities we also identified some improvement points which were resolved together with USDA.
365 products and processes
In total about 365 unit process datasets for field crop production have been added to Agri-footprint. These include data on cottonseed and cottonlint, groundnuts, maize, oats, rice, soybean and winter, spring and durum wheat. Data are available for the main producing states within the United States. The data are derived from survey data and statistics and are aggregated at the state level.We are proud to include these LCA Commons crop production data in Agri-footprint, expanding its geographical scope and making valuable and high-quality data available to more LCA researchers.
Read more about Agri-footprint
More information
If you want to know more about Agri-footprint, please get in touch with Jasper Scholten at jasper@blonkconsultants.nl or call +31 (0) 182 579970.