Using EIOLCA to evaluate a product

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This page provides a guide for using EIOLCA to evaluate the the environmental implications associated with production of a particular product or service (also see the tutorial on http://www.eiolca.net for more information)

Contents

Identify Appropriate Sectors

Identify the appropriate sector(s) representing manufacturing, use, transportation, and end of life of your product.

Manufacturing

  1. To account for manufacturing, look first for a sector of the economy that is representative of your product:
    1. Go to http://www.eiolca.net
    2. Click “Use the Model”
    3. Search for sectors that contain key words identifying your product. (If the search does not work for the US 2002 Purchaser Price model, search the sectors using the Producer Price model and then switch back to the Purchaser Price model after selecting your sector.)
  2. Select a sector in the list and scroll down the page (below "Run Model") to see what types of items show up in the sector. For more detailed sector information on the proportion of each sector represented by individual items in the sector, you can get information directly from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (http://bea.gov):
    1. Go to http://bea.gov
    2. Click on Benchmark Input-Output Accounts
    3. Click on the Benchmark I-O data table for the desired year (Use the year that eiolca.net uses: in this case, 2002 data)
    4. Download the detailed Item Output from the 2002 Benchmark Input-Output Accounts
    5. Look at the benchmark I-O Item Output list to see which items make up the sector and what percentage of the sector is accounted for by items that are representative of your product.
      1. If your product is representative of the sector, it is good to use. For example, passenger vehicles represent about half of the economic activity in the “Automobile and light truck manufacturing” sector. The other half is “Trucks, truck tractors and bus chassis, etc.” If you use the “Automobile and light truck manufacturing” sector to represent a typical passenger vehicle, results may overestimate along dimensions where trucks are more environmentally intensive than cars per dollar, but it will likely provide a very good high-level estimate.
      2. If the sector is not representative of your product, you may need to break the product down into components that can be found in more representative sectors. For example, “household and person-weighing scales” represents a small fraction of the “Scales, balances and miscellaneous general purpose machinery” sector, and the other items that dominate the sector (like “filters and strainers” and “all other general industrial machinery”) may have dramatically different impacts from household scales. If this sector is used to assess the impact of a household scale, it should be used with great care. Alternatively, the scale can be disassembled into components, and representative sectors can be used for each component. For example, you may decide that “All other forging and stamping”, which is dominated by “other metal job stampings, expect automotive,” is roughly representative of steel stamped components of the household scale. In this case, all major components would be run separately, and results would be aggregated to examine full effects.

Use

If your product consumes energy or releases toxins during use, this may have a greater impact than production. To find out, estimate the energy use or emissions during use. If the product is a gas grill that runs on natural gas, for example, you can use the “natural gas distribution” sector to account for manufacturing of the gas, and you will need additional information about emissions associated with burning natural gas to account for emissions directly from using the grill. If your product is plugged into the wall, you can use the “power generation and supply” sector by estimating the cost of powering the product over its useful life.

Transportation

If you use the “Purchaser Price” database (described later) instead of the “Industry Benchmark” database, average transportation to retail establishments is included. If not, you will need to make an estimate of costs to transport the product and include transportation sectors in your analysis.

End of Life

Effects of final disposal of the product may be more difficult to capture; however, this will often not be a dominant source of impact. EIO-LCA does have a “waste management and remediation services” sector that can be used, if appropriate, and recycling “credits” can also be included as an advanced topic.

Estimate Economic Activity

Estimate the amount of economic activity attributable to the relevant sector(s) identified above

  1. Purchaser Price vs. Producer Price: The default EIO-LCA database is the US 2002 Benchmark, which represents producer prices or wholesale prices. However, if you know only the price paid for the product in a store, this is the retail price. Under the “Advanced” tab under “Use the Model”, you have the option to change to “US National Purchaser Price Models: US 2002 (428)”, which uses average values of retail markup, including transportation costs, to translate between retail and wholesale prices.
    1. The purchaser price model will estimate emissions associated with transportation for product distribution and retail.
    2. $1M worth of retail price consumption in a sector will not necessarily generate $1M worth of activity in that sector, since some of the retail cost flows to the transportation and retail sectors.
  2. Translating to 2002 Dollars: The current value of the product can be translated into 2002 dollars (or the year of the chosen EIO database) using:
    1. A GDP deflator index calculation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDP_deflator)
    2. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index inflation calculator (http://www.bls.gov/cpi)

Run EIO-LCA for Each Sector

  1. http://www.eiolca.net
  2. Click “Use the Model”
  3. Select the “Purchaser Price” model on the “Advanced” tab, if appropriate
  4. Select the appropriate sector
  5. Click the data of interest (for example “economic activity”)
  6. Enter the dollar value for that product: Technically, you should be able to enter the dollar amount associated with a single unit of your product if you wish; however, because the impact associated with a single unit is so small, you will typically see many zeros due to round-off errors. Instead, examine impact associated with $1 million worth of units and convert it to a per unit basis later, if you wish. (Note that the number you enter will be in millions of dollars, for the year of the model.)
  7. Click “Display Data”
  8. You can export the data to Excel to help you add together impacts from multiple sectors, if needed. You can also click on "Change Inputs" to select multiple categories (e.g. both Economic Activity and Greenhouse Gases) to be displayed in the same table.

Identify Dominant Sources of Impact

  1. After running the model (and aggregating relevant sectors, if necessary), you will have estimates of conventional air pollutants, greenhouse gasses, energy use, and toxic releases associated with your product. Which are the aspects on which you should focus for green redesign and improvement? There is no general and easy answer, but there are several considerations and resources that can help.
    1. Ask What You Can Control: If you are considering multiple specific design possibilities, a comparison focused on the elements that differ among them may be most important. For example, you may examine the implications of replacing a steel frame with aluminum. However, if the elements that are most obviously under your control have relatively small environmental impact compared to the dominant impact associated with the product, you should try some brainstorming and innovative thinking to see how you can deliver the same or a related service or experience in an entirely different way that can reduce or eliminate the dominant source of impact.
    2. Direct and Indirect Impact: If the impact is primarily direct (directly from the sector), improvement may come from direct changes to production processes. If the impact is primarily indirect (coming from suppliers and suppliers’ suppliers), then reduction of impact may come primarily from reduction of the use of commodities from other sectors that have most environmental impact (such as electricity).
    3. Dominance of Some Life Cycle Stages: If the use phase generates most of the environmental impact, green redesign may focus on reduction of energy consumption during use. If the manufacturing phase dominates, green redesign may focus on improved choice of materials or production processes. If transportation dominates, weight and packaging reduction may be important.
    4. Relative Importance of Different Dimensions of Environmental Impact: Determining the relative importance of contributions to global warming, human health problems, and ecosystem degradation (not to mention more detailed tradeoffs between increased or decreased emissions of one or another pollutant) is difficult, and there is no universally accepted method for weighting and aggregating factors into a single unit of “environmental impact.” Here are two (imperfect) methods commonly used:
      1. Valuation Estimates of Externality Costs: Economists attempt to determine the social cost of environmental impact through a variety of methods, including 1) accounting for the costs to repair the damage caused by emissions and 2) measuring individual willingness to pay for things like reduced health risks, etc. If you are interested in doing so, you can use these valuation metrics to assign dollar values to emissions and identify issues associated with your product that have the largest social cost. This article is a good place to start.
      2. Eco-Indicators: Researchers have also elicited subjective opinions from experts in fields related to environmental science on what reasonable importance weights defining tradeoffs should be. While experts have provided wildly varying estimates, indicators such as Eco-Indicator 99 average these estimates in an attempt to arrive at reasonable numbers. Clearly, such weights remain subjective, and interpretation must be pursued with care. However, if one aspect dominates others by orders of magnitude, the confidence in qualitative conclusions may be relatively high. This article is a good place to start.


Exercise

Try EIO-LCA out. Select a product and do a rough analysis of environmental impact.

Objectives:

  • Gain exposure to and experience with environmental life cycle assessment
  • Learn to identify and to consider supply chain impacts associated with their design choices
  • Identify dominant sources and modes of environmental impact for their chosen product and determine areas of focus for green redesign

Assignment:

Use the supply chain and life cycle assessment software tool EIO-LCA to conduct a rough analysis of your product by examining the sector or sectors that most closely represent production, transportation and use of your product. With this software and your own analysis, answer the following questions:

  • Which sectors release most of the greenhouse gasses and air pollutants associated with producing and using your product?
  • Which product phase is most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions: Production, transportation, or use of your product?
  • Which industries are responsible for the largest mass of total toxic releases associated with producing and using your product? Can you identify any specific components as most relevant?
  • Recognizing that a more detailed analysis may be required to improve accuracy and certainty of predictions, what implications does your current analysis have for green redesign of your product? Where should you focus your attention?
  • Discuss uncertainty and your level of confidence in your conclusions (if there is too much uncertainty to make a conclusion – say so and explain why).

For more information

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