Written by Long Trail Sustainability, Senior Consultant, Shelly Severinghaus
Ecoinvent 3 is available in three system models in SimaPro and in market and transformation classifications. Depending on the goal and scope of your study, you may choose to use one system model versus another, and depending on your data availability you may use market or transformation data.
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Long Trail Sustainability Senior Consultant, Shelly Severinghaus, recently interviewed Robin Tindall, Environmental Stewardship Manager at Hypertherm, a New Hampshire based manufacturer of industrial cutting solutions, about why, how and when Hypertherm uses life cycle assessment.
The engineering mission at Hypertherm is to develop innovative technologies, products and solutions that provide superior value to our customers, our owners and our planet. To provide superior value to our planet, we know that we need to reduce the environmental impact of everything we do. To this end, we began working with Long Trail Sustainability in 2012 to conduct Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs).
Life cycle assessment is a powerful methodology to evaluate the environmental impacts over the life of a product or service. An LCA can help answer many questions about where the hot spots are, how one material or product compares to another and where there are tradeoffs.
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Written by Long Trail Sustainability, Senior Consultant, Shelly Severinghaus
Ever wonder what electricity mixes exist in SimaPro? Or what electricity type you should choose in SimaPro? We hope to demystify electricity in SimaPro in this post.
The electricity processes in the SimaPro database contain the fuel types to produce the electricity, the transmission network, loss due to going between the electricity types (e.g. from high to medium voltage), and direct emissions. Electricity grid mixes can be found under the Energy > Electricity Country mix category, and electricity production by specific fuel types can be found under the Energy > Electricity by fuel category.
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Written by Long Trail Sustainability, Senior Consultant, Shelly Severinghaus and Consultant, Paula Bernstein
SimaPro is a powerful and comprehensive LCA software tool, and there are many features that you may only discover through time in the software or from fellow SimaPro users. We’re going to share some of our favorite, lesser known ones here, including copying a process from one project to another, the show as list feature, how to analyze a specific contribution and how to save as system-level data.
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Written by Long Trail Sustainability, Senior Consultant, Shelly Severinghaus
DATASMART LCI Package is a dataset we created for our North American SimaPro customers. This dataset was originally developed to create a North American focused dataset, based on a combination of US LCI v.1.60 and Ecoinvent v.2.2 data, modified specifically to be representative of U.S. operations. In an effort to continually provide more data, DATASMART has expanded to a larger dataset, covering more regions and industries, containing data developed by us and data submitted to us by companies and researchers. Submission into the database entails an extensive review of the data to ensure accuracy. This data includes data across many industries, including metals, agriculture, textiles, and more.
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What we love about life cycle assessment (LCA) is that it can be applied to anything. This means that we get to be involved in a wide variety of projects across industries. A couple highlights of 2018 include our participation in an ongoing USDA NIFA Integrated Biorefinery Optimization grant research project and an LCA for a new luxury sustainable wellness brand to determine the environmental impacts of benchmark packaging options which will inform the design of the brand’s refillable packaging. Both projects, while very different, share a desire to innovate and bring about positive change for society and the environment. It’s very exciting for us to be able to participate in these innovations and make a contribution.
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By Shelly Severinghaus, LTS Senior Consultant
New and familiar faces mingled in small groups, catching up with peers and commenting on the foliage, while brilliant golden aspen trees dotted the town. Jori Coustillas, SimaPro Product Owner at PRe Sustainability, and I, Shelly Severinghaus, Senior Consultant at LTS, fielded SimaPro and LCA questions, as folks shared their experiences with one another. Read more
By Shelly Severinghaus, LTS Senior Consultant
Continuing to blaze the path on industry sustainability standards, on July 23, 2018, the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) published its first State of Sustainability in the Outdoor Industry report, establishing a baseline for the outdoor industry’s sustainability performance and highlighting examples of best practices including some by LTS clients: Read more
Shelly with clients from Burton, Seventh Generation and Hypertherm at the session on The Business Value of LCA
We learned from our peers during the conference sessions.
And supported our clients Seventh Generation, Burton Snowboards, and Hypertherm North America with their presentations on the business value of LCA.
By Nicole Sala, LTS Sustainability Analyst Intern
This year marks the 48th celebration of Earth Day, which has grown to be the largest civic observance event in the world with over 1 billion people participating in activities (earthday.org). This year’s campaign theme: environmental & climate literacy. How can we educate ourselves and empower others to drive actions that sustain the planet and people 10 years, 20 years and 100+ years from now?
I recently attended the International Society of Sustainability Professionals #ISSPBig3 webinar, Looking Into the Future with Sustainability’s Big 3: Interface, Patagonia and Unilever, and was inspired by the answers to the panel question, “What are you most optimistic about for the future?” Read more