Article submitted by Emilia Ingemarsdotter – Consultant at PRé Sustainability
- Tell us about PRé Sustainability What is your core business and role within the project?
PRé Sustainability has been at the forefront of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for more than 30 years. We have always tried to innovate the field, from developing LCA Software to Life Cycle Impact Assessment methodologies. The next challenge is to scale up the use of LCA and digitization is key in making LCA more dynamic and available for real-time decision making. That is what we try to contribute to the ECOFACT project.
- Why did your organisation get involved in the ECOFACT project? How does this activity fit with the normal business of your organisation?
ECOFACT is aiming to facilitate dynamic LCA for real-time decision making in a factory environment by connecting systems at site level and enabling continuous recalculation of LCA results. It thus fits very well with our ambition to scale up LCA and make sustainability related decisions more fact based.
- How will the outputs of the ECOFACT project help production system energy performance?
Dynamic LCA results will enable decision makers to monitor the environmental performance of the factory, including the energy system, and also look at the environmental impact of the decision they make so this can be taken into account..
4. What are the technical challenges your work in ECOFACT is trying to overcome?
A challenge in traditional LCA is the time and effort needed for data collection. This makes it challenging to keep the results up to date as the underlying data changes. The ECOFACT platform enables automatic recalculation of the LCA results based on the latest data measured in the factory, ensuring that the results are always relavant. In the ECOFACT project, we work on setting up this live link for data transfer between the factory and the ‘LCA engine’ on the cloud. Technical challenges include finding a balance between, one the one hand, clarity about data collection requirements, on the other hand, flexibility in the model and approach. An overall technical challenge for the ECOFACT project is also the integration between the different systems that will collaborate on the platform.
- What positive impacts will the projects have when complete?
The outputs and learnings of the project can help others implement dynamic LCA in their factory and thereby make more informed decisions that take the environmental performance into account.
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