PEF Remodeling
Remodeling the Environmental and Organisation Footprinting pilotsBackground
The Environmental Footprint initiative of the European Commission is one of the major developments for Life Cycle Assessment and related approaches in recent years. Starting point is the idea to extend Carbon Footprint for addressing more environmental impacts, and to create one space of harmonised, consistent data and methods, refined for specific products, in a process inspired by Environmental Product Declarations.
In two “waves”, about 70 pilots have been developed for various products and (some few) organisations, with very broad industry and stakeholder participation, based on an initial draft method that has been published even in the official Journal of the European Union.
About the remodeling project – goals
With finalisation of the pilots, it is apparant that they are not yet fully consistent, e.g. in terms of modeling approach, background data used, reference data used, and even use of specific features in specific LCA software. Further, the models are not publicly available, and cannot really be shared across different LCA software systems.
To address all this, and some other aspects, the PEF remodeling project has been launched by the European Commission, and has been awarded to a rather large consortium, consisting of all major LCA software providers, and many consultants involved in the EF pilots.
GreenDelta in the remodeling project
In the consortium, GreenDelta is responsible for
- remodeling the pilots for intermediate paper (graphical paper, tissue, packaging paper), and for photovoltaic systems
- reviewing models remodeled by thinkstep
- openLCA is one of the main LCA software systems in the project; an extended, “official” ILCD format which allows (at least) links between processes will be implemented in openLCA, and most importantly, all remodeled pilots, created currently in different LCA software, will be imported into openLCA, and exported from openLCA in the extended ILCD format and in a newly specified Excel template. GaBi, from thinkstep, will be the other software which also imports all models.
The image below provides an overview of the workflow.
