Product Environmental Footprints (CE-RISE Deliverable 3.3)

The environmental impact of products is a key envisioned component of sustainability information communication with the support of digital product passports (DPPs). The calculation of such environmental impacts is standardised by the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology. As the calculation of environmental impacts using this methodology requires a large amount of data along the value chain, the DPP offers advantages not only for the communication of environmental impact results, but also as a tool for communicating the data required to compute such environmental impacts, and hence, in order to automate the process of calculation. The on-hand document is centred around two questions:1. How can the DPP be leveraged to automate PEF-compliant impact assessment?2. How can such PEF-compliant impact assessment results be included in a DPP in a standardised way? To answer these questions, the on-hand document aims to outline the impact calculation procedure. It consists of three parts1. The data structure for information related to the impact calculation needed in the DPP, derived from the PEF guidelines. This concerns both the inputs required for the impact calculation, as well as the output of such an impact calculation.2. The impact calculation procedure itself that translates the information structured as defined in part 1 into environmental impact using the Brightway2 software and the BONSAI database.3. Two case studies where information provided by users are translated into the data structure described in part 1, after which the impact calculation procedure detailed in part 2 has been applied in order to calculate the related impacts. Ultimately, this document illustrates how DPPs can be structured and used for environmental impact calculation. This provides the building blocks for implementation at scale in the CE-RISE system.