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Life Cycle Data and Tools for States and Communities
Citation:
Ingwersen, W. Life Cycle Data and Tools for States and Communities. EPA R8 SMM State and Local Government Call, NA, April 23, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
To present on LCA tools for EPA Region 8 Sustainable Materials Management State and Local Government Call. A quarterly call to discuss solid waste diversion, source reduction, composting, recycling and other sustainable materials management topics. This call is for state and local (county, city) governments and some state recycling associations with permission only. This meeting of the group is about application of life cycle assessment by states and communities.
Description:
US states and communities that are interested using life cycle assessment (LCA) face the challenge of satisfying heavy requirements related to acquiring data/models, tools, and expertise. Although existing tools developed by EPA and others are useful for domain-specific applications, like WARM for municipal solid waste management and SEFA for site remediation, more generalized tools are often required for broader LCA applications. Data and tools for LCA should meet a number of requirements, including being affordable, having a common user community, making analysis repeatable, allowing data sharing, being transparent, as well as vetted and verified, and ideally requiring minimal user expertise. Although traditional LCA tools, specifically openLCA, with the support and direction of US EPA and others, meet some of these requirements, they still require significant expertise and data, which are less readily available, relevant and timely. EPA has developed an LCA model called USEEIO and an accompanying suite of tools called the SMM Tool Suite, that can fill these gaps for a number of uses including for SMM-based prioritization, and will be freely available. High-level differences between the USEEIO/SMM Tool Suite and traditional LCA data and tools were discussed, and opportunities for future use of the USEEIO model are shared.