LCIA Formatter

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an established and standardized methodology to comprehensively assess environmental and public health metrics across industries and products (International Organization for Standardization, 2006). The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) is developing an open source LCA tool ecosystem (Ingwersen, 2019). The ecosystem includes tools to automate the creation of life cycle inventory (LCI) datasets, which account for flows to and from nature for steps across the life cycle of products or services, and tools for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) to support classification and characterization of the cumulative LCI to potential impacts. Impacts are expressed via indicators, either midpoint or endpoint, corresponding to different points on the environmental cause-effect chain model (Frischknecht & Jolliet, 2016). This paper describes a USEPA LCA ecosystem tool ‘LCIA formatter’ that extracts LCIA information from original source methods and converts the data for interoperability with the rest of the USEPA LCA ecosystem tools.