Within the framework of the Life Effige project, four tools available to companies interested in learning more about the PEF method and the calculation of the environmental footprint of products have been developed:

PEFStarter is an online tool addressed to companies, especially SMEs, who want to approach the method for the calculation of the product environmental footprint (PEF), to understand its objectives and procedures and to know the advantages that can be obtained by its application.

The tool is available in both Italian and English languages at the site https://pefstarter.enea.it.

MEdit (Metadata Edit) is a tool for editing metadata of Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) datasets in International Reference Life Cycle Data system (ILCD) format.
Metadata summarize basic information about LCI data and support the informed use of datasets by end users.
MEdit allows the amendment and completion of the metadata for datasets exported from LCA commercial software in ILCD format.

The tool is available under subscription at https://medit.enea.it/

Providing reliable and understandable information on the environmental performance of products and services is a necessary action to support the consumers’ purchasing decisions and guide them towards more sustainable purchasing choices. This need arises to allow the effective and wide dissemination of truly “green” products in the market, ensuring that the consumer can recognize and reward them.

These guidelines aim to provide support for environmental product communication and green marketing initiatives. The document starts with an overview regarding the consumer’s perspective and their growing environmental awareness, and then goes on to illustrate the principles to be respected for environmental communication, also providing several concrete examples of communication traced on the web. The document closes with a brief description of the main methods for carrying out LCA studies, which indicators to choose for consumer communication and how to make them more understandable through the use of conversion factors and equivalences that are intuitive and closer to people’s daily lives.

The guidelines are available at the following link.

The Life-cycle communication tool stems from the realisation that the results of an LCA/PEF study are difficult to understand for most non-technical stakeholders, and it aims to help companies promote the results of a life cycle analysis and related environmental footprint calculation.
This tool allows an easier understanding of the results, which are compared with other impacts through equivalences. In other words, it translates the LCA / PEF results into the impacts of more familiar products and processes, giving people a simpler idea of the size of their environmental footprint.
The tool then allows companies that have calculated their environmental footprint using the PEF method to develop a new communication and green marketing strategy.

The life-cycle communication tool is available at this link.

Companies can further improve their own environmental management and products by integrating the PEF methodology with ecolabels and the environmental management system (EMS). The scope of the PEF integration guideline is to support companies with this integration process. This guideline lists the main linkages between the PEF, Ecolabels, EMS and GPP and describes the advantages that can emerge from their integration.

Click here to download the guidelines.

The ‘Banca dati Italiana LCA’, developed in LIFE EFFIGE, includes Life Cycle Inventory data and metadata for the description of products and processes of the supply chains investigated in the PEF (Product Environmental Footprint) studies of the project.

The ‘Banca dati Italiana LCA’, which is a registered node of the Life Cycle Data Network (https://eplca.jrc.ec.europa.eu/LCDN/), is available at http://bancadatiitalianalca.enea.it:8080/Node/

The EFFIGE eco-design tool aims to support the design of office products (e.g. chairs) by paying attention to their environmental footprint. This tool allows to compare the impacts of a product related to different production choices. Thanks to this tool, furniture companies producing office chairs can adopt the most environmentally friendly solutions to produce chairs with a lower environmental impact.

The tool allows designers to simulate different design solutions for an office chair by choosing, for example, the materials, the weight of the components, the power supply distance, thus returning the results in terms of 4 impact categories: Climate change – fossil (kg CO2 / eq.); Resource use, energy carriers (MJ); Inorganic respiratory (inc. disease) and Land and Freshwater acidification (mol H + eq.). These impact categories were chosen because they are more relevant in the screening studies. The tool also compares the environmental impacts of the design simulation with those of a representative product.

The tool is available at this link.

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