The enhanced LCA Resources Directory: a tool aimed at improving Life Cycle Thinking practices

To support life cycle based EU policies, the European Commission created the “European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment (EPLCA)”. The platform aims at providing coherent and quality-assured life cycle data, methods and studies. The LCA Resource Directory (RD) is one of the deliverables of the EPLCA. This application has been containing so far lists of services, tools, databases and the corresponding developers and providers. The RD has recently been further developed so that it can contain and characterize LCA studies with metadata. The new functionalities of the RD allow experts and non-experts users to browse a database of LCA studies. Many of the fields of the template used to characterize the studies are based on the ISO 14040:2006; and on the ISO 14044:2006. Some fields of the template are mandatory in order to ensure that the information showed in the application fulfills the requirements of the ISO 14044 for reports to be disclosed to the public. Any research group, company or university owning an LCA study is now able, after registration, to upload the study and fill-in associated metadata. With these new functionalities of the RD, the EPLCA makes progress in its aim of promoting life cycle thinking when making available to all kind of LCA practitioners a database of LCA studies, together with a searching tool.

SANFELIX FORNER Javier Vicente;  MATHIEUX Fabrice;  DE LA RUA Cristina;  WOLF Marc-Andree;  CHOMKHAMSRI Kirana; 

2013-01-08

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG

JRC69087

0948-3349,   

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11367-012-0468-x,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC69087,   

10.1007/s11367-012-0468-x,