Life Cycle Assessment
The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) collection is a catalog and archive of data, tools, and resources that support LCA for agriculture and related areas of research. It is complementary to the USDA LCA Commons Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database, and provides access to a wider range LCA data and tools.
Life Cycle Assessment (also known as life cycle analysis, or cradle-to-grave analysis) is a method of assessing environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product's life. For example, it measures impact from raw material extraction to materials processing, manufacture, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal or recycling. The goal of LCA is to compare the full range of environmental effects assignable to products and services by quantifying all inputs and outputs of material flows, and then assessing how these material flows impact the environment. This information is used to improve processes, support policy, and provide a sound basis for informed decisions.
Browse Life Cycle Assessment Resources
- Life Cycle Assessment Tools is a catalog of tools for life cycle data management
and analysis. - USDA Life Cycle Assessment Commons Inventory Data is a collection of unit processes, formatted for use in LCA software.
- Case Studies and Supporting Data provides access to supporting data that are not formatted for use in LCA software.
Datasets
Unit process data for field crop production version 2
Unit process data for field crop production version 1.1
Unit process data for field crop production version 1
Product system model for distributed renewable syngas production
Data from: A life cycle assessment of the environmental impacts of a beef system in the USA
Data from: Environmental footprints of beef cattle production in the United States
Unit process data for Rapeseed production in the U.S. wheat belt
Unit processes represent wheat-wheat-fallow and wheat-wheat-rapeseed crop production simulations that illustrate using the IPCC (Tier 1) method for calculating changes in soil C and the roundtable on sustainable biomaterials (RSB) method for estimating N2O emissions in different locations for the use in modeling the crop production portion of the HRJ lifecycle. Data are archived in a SimaPro .csv file, which can be imported into various life cycle assessment modeling tools.