Environmental Footprint

The Environmental Footprint (EF) is a life cycle assessment (LCA) based method to quantify the environmental impacts of products (goods or services). It has been developed under the supervision of the EU Commission. A pilot phase was run for 5 years (2013-2018) to test the PEF/OEF methods by 27 different industry sectors and about 20 Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) and Organisation Environmental Footprint Sectoral Rules (OEFSRs) were developed.
The project is in a transition phase (2019-2024) during which the implementation of sets of rules established (PEFCRs) is monitored, the rules are expanded, and the background or secondary data sets developed are updated and expanded.
Currently the EU Commission is also exploring how to use the Product and Organisation Environmental Footprint methods in policies.
Three oxygenated solvents (acetone, n-butanol and butyl glycol ethers) and three categories of hydrocarbon solvents which have consumer end uses were selected to develop cradle-to-gate life-cycle inventories to facilitate the calculation of Product or Organisation Environmental Footprints (PEFs/OEFs) and assure that a solid Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data base for solvent is available.
These EF compliant datasets are based on the latest standards.
Anyone wanting to engage in such an exercise can find ILCD or excel formatted data per solvents as well as the respective EF eview report or download all six sets as Gabi Database file.