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Test of US Federal Life Cycle Inventory Data Interoperability
Citation:
Ingwersen, W. Test of US Federal Life Cycle Inventory Data Interoperability. JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION. Elsevier Science Ltd, New York, NY, 101:118-121, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
EPA NRMRL along with other federal agencies and labs are working together to provide publically-available, high quality data to support life cycle assessment studies. A major challenge is making data from different agencies interoperable, or able to be used together. For a meeting of the Technical Working Group on Federal LCA Data Interoperability in February 2015, I performed an exercise to test the status quo of interoperability of life cycle data currently. The purpose, methods, and results of this test are presented in this short paper.
Description:
Life cycle assessment practitioners must gather data from a variety of sources. For modeling activities in the US, practitioners may wish to use life cycle inventory data from public databases and libraries provided by US government entities. An exercise was conducted to test if a practitioner could gather and use data from existing US federal sources together to build a life cycle assessment model in standard software. As a result, interoperability issues were identified that US federal agencies need to overcome in order to provide functionally interoperable life cycle inventory data to the public. These same challenges apply more broadly to using life cycle inventory data from different sources.
