Published by Blonk Consultants at 01/03/2018

Release of Agri-footprint 4.0

LCA database update

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 Agri-footprint 4.0 has been released in SimaPro. 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 enhanced the quality of the data. 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.

365 products and processes

In total about 365 unit process datasets for field crop production, developed by the University of Washington Design for Environment, 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.