2024 was a great year at ecoinvent; our team grew significantly, we released a new version of our database (explore v3.11), participated in more events than ever before, engaged in meaningful projects, published academic papers, and connected with partners all over the world.
In November, we published the latest version of our database featuring 2,066 new and 4,497 updated datasets and provided an update to version 3.10. Learn more about these database updates in our introductory webinar.
In 2024, we also published various video resources to help our users understand our database and mission.
Introducing:
Subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest updates about our work.
The license calculator is a series of short videos created to help users discover which license type best suits their use case.
To use the license calculator, watch the video and click the answers to the questions when prompted. At the end of the journey, users will receive a description of their recommended license type.
For pricing information, please consult our licenses page.
We were pleased to feature IPC and Mura Technology in our partner spotlight series this year. Thank you to Timothée Harvey, Catherine Colin, and Dr. Geoff Brighty for sharing their insights on the importance of collaboration for the availability of robust, high-quality data and how the ecoinvent database supports more accurate Life Cycle Assessment.
Read our partner spotlights:
We are also grateful to our version 3.11 data providers for enabling us to provide transparent, accurate data.
The ORIENTING research project was finalized this year.
This 3.5-year project aimed to create a robust, operational methodology for product Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). It allows practitioners to understand and manage possible trade-offs, whilst also supporting a societal shift towards a more sustainable and circular economy.
More information about our contributions and the final results are available on our ORIENTING project page.
We joined 30 events around the world, delivering presentations, posters, and lectures and attending many more events in 14 countries.
As well as sharing our knowledge and facilitating discussion, we’ve also collected insights to share on our blog.
Read our reflections:
We keep a regularly updated list of our upcoming events on our website. Announcements can be found in our quarterly newsletters or through LinkedIn.
There has been significant evolution behind the scenes at the ecoinvent headquarters in Zürich. This year, we welcomed a new addition to our management team and the anniversaries of some of our extraordinary employees.
For our latest management update, we welcome Ondrej Szabo to the ecoinvent team as our new Chief Revenue Officer. Read more about our new leadership here.
This year, we celebrated our team members whose tenure has reached a significant milestone. Thank you again to Guillaume, Tessa, and Tarja for sharing your unique perspectives on ecoinvent’s growth and history. We will share more milestones in 2025 via the blog.
As a team, we came together to celebrate various festivities and successes. Whilst fostering a collaborative and positive team culture at ecoinvent, we socialized, explored, and enjoyed lots of good food!
In 2024, our team grew to 80 passionate professionals, and counting! Check our careers page for available positions and more information about joining the ecoinvent team.
Thank you for your continued trust and partnership. Our team wishes you a holiday season filled with joy, peace, and renewal, and we look forward to working together in the coming year to continue driving positive environmental change.
ORIENTING consists of seventeen companies and organizations from around Europe, including ecoinvent. The consortium’s main purpose is to integrate a life cycle approach that includes analyzing environmental, social, and economic impacts.
The ORIENTING research project aimed to develop an operational methodology for product Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). This methodology can be applied to evaluating linear and circular product systems, and it enables practitioners to understand and manage possible trade-offs.
Beginning in 2020, seven work packages strove to achieve goals related to creating a practical tool for assessing sustainability performance in a comprehensive, consistent, and practical way.
The project outcomes enable informed business decisions and contribute to developing a level playing field–a single market–for products based on robust (i.e., transparent and verifiable) sustainability information.
Source: ORIENTING Project (2021)
Using its expertise in life cycle inventories, the data needs of life cycle-based sustainability assessments, and data and database management, ecoinvent assisted or participated in most work packages.
From ecoinvent, Database Content Lead Thomas Sonderegger contributed to the project and is listed as an author on two reports (linked below). Thomas shared the following insights on the experience:
“Being part of such a future-oriented project trying to push methodologies in sustainability assessment was a challenging, but inspiring experience. We can use our learnings to improve the ecoinvent database and advance sustainability assessment in an ORIENTING sense. The project included collaboration with many excellent, dedicated, competent, nice, and fun people. I am happy to have been part of this.”
ecoinvent led the task of creating an ontology to facilitate interoperability between information resources, databases, and simulation software within the LCSA domain. In particular, ecoinvent is proud to have been responsible for the following deliverables:
This report describes the LCSA ontology developed in the ORIENTING project: “ORIONT”. The purpose of ORIONT is to structure the most important methodological and data elements (ontology classes) and their relationships.
This report describes data specifications for a future LCSA data format following the methodological framework developed in the ORIENTING project.
The final results of the wider project can be found on our ORIENTING project page.
I write these thoughts on a Friday afternoon from the shores of the San Francisco Bay. On my left, the Golden Gate Bridge peaks through the fog, while on my right, Alcatraz Island looms in the water. It’s an ideal place and time to reflect on my week in San Jose, attending Verge 24, a conference exploring the topic of deploying climate tech at scale.
My goals were to understand the drivers behind the U.S.-based sustainability market, the specific needs created by those drivers and the technological landscape, how ecoinvent currently meets these needs, and what a possible shared future could look like.
Firstly, I sought to understand why businesses in the U.S. care about sustainability. U.S. climate regulations aren’t as strict as in the European Union. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dropped Scope 3 reporting, and most other sustainability regulations are specific to California and need time to come into effect.
Interestingly, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which requires companies trading in the EU to report on the impact of corporate activities on the environment and society, is felt across the Atlantic and is frequently cited as a driver. This is because large enterprises tend to be active in both markets.
Other drivers include the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which grants tax credits for investments contributing to clean electricity and transport.
Some large tech corporations are also empowered by high margins and the conviction that we need to take care of this planet. These corporations set positive trends when they pay premiums for sustainable products.
Lastly, Verge 24 attendees cited end-consumer expectations as a driver for sustainable sourcing and production.
My second goal was to better understand what these companies are trying to achieve.
I discovered that the overwhelming majority of attending companies, keynotes, and panel discussions were focused on carbon. This is unsurprising and shows that other sustainability topics, such as biodiversity and social impact, have yet to take center stage at these kinds of events.
Repeatedly, I heard discussions about low-carbon technologies, carbon removal, and carbon accounting in various forms: Accounting & Reporting (A&R), Product Carbon Footprint (PCF), Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF), etc. Excitingly, many of the individuals I spoke to on these matters were already users of the ecoinvent database.
I also asked about the challenges they currently face in achieving their carbon-related goals, and the most common response was a need for more primary data and more specific background data. AI solutions are currently not sophisticated enough to address this problem fully, so businesses and individuals are finding creative ways to solve this challenge for their unique cases. Some build models on top of our data to modify parameters on semiconductors and batteries, others ship their physical devices to specialized supply chain forensics, and many buy and combine multiple data sources. This is where a comprehensive database like ecoinvent will have a bigger impact in the future.
At ecoinvent, we are committed to providing high-quality, transparent background data worldwide to support data-driven sustainability decisions. Our database continues to grow to support our users and offer a comprehensive overview of environmental impact. This month, we released our latest update, ecoinvent version 3.11 which brings a wealth of new and updated datasets covering a broad range of sectors. Our database will continue to support our users across the globe.
— Nick Van Berckelaer, Head of Software Product Development
We will host an introductory webinar next month to unveil the key highlights, improvements, and expanded datasets included in version 3.11. Join us on one of the following dates:
Our latest release demonstrates our continued commitment to providing the most comprehensive LCI database on the planet. Discover a wealth of data in 3.11, including 2,066 new and 4,497 updated datasets.
Explore everything version 3.11 offers on our Knowledge Base.
This release is the culmination of our work with our many partners from both industrial and scientific institutions. These collaborations enable us to provide high-quality, accurate data, and we are very grateful to our data providers for their efforts. You can find the full list of 3.11’s data providers here.
To learn more about how we collaborate with our data providers, read our latest Partner Spotlight: Interview with Dr. Geoff Brighty of Mura Technology.
The detailed representation of the chemical sector’s value chain in the ecoinvent database empowers industries to make data-driven decisions for more sustainable practices. In our latest video, our experts Daria Dellenbach (Project Manager) and Iasonas Ioannou (Project Manager) describe how they contribute to the operational processes and strategy of our database to ensure a reliable and comprehensive chemicals sector.
Our database contains over 750 unique chemical products, including over 450 basic chemicals, 95 types of plastics and rubber, and 83 agrochemicals. This data supports life cycle assessments for various products and services, enabling sustainable decision-making in the value chain.
Our mission is to promote and support the availability of high-quality environmental data worldwide to support informed sustainability decisions. Our latest release, version 3.11, is coming soon with new and updated information for the chemical sector.
Explore the chemicals and plastics sector of the ecoinvent database to learn how high-quality data allows industries to better assess their environmental impacts.
Tarja is our Finance and Accounting Specialist. She manages ecoinvent’s financial and accounting activities and provides support to the Sales team. As of 2024, Tarja has been with ecoinvent for ten years. We asked her to share some insights on her ecoinvent experience.
At the moment, I am a Finance and Accounting Specialist. I work in the Finance team with Fabrice and am mainly responsible for accounts receivable, as well as big resellers’ monthly maintenance extensions.
Flexibility. The fact that I can work quite independently from my home office, even from abroad, makes it possible for me to spend longer at home in Finland.
It has really changed a lot! I started as an assistant for Administration (HR), Accounting, and Sales, basically everything but the technical stuff. We were only six people.
Over ten years, ecoinvent grew a lot and my workload increased, so it was impossible to do it alone any longer. My main focus has remained in sales and finances. In Sales, more people were employed over the years, but only two years ago Fabrice joined ecoinvent. Until then, I was alone in finance.
The change is huge. From a six-person start-up in three small rooms to a company of over seventy employees with a huge office.
In the first years, it was very familiar. We all had lunch together, we all talked with each other, and we all knew each other well. Now, everything is more organized, there are team leads, and different tools to be used.
There are many nice and funny memories. One I find really funny is the story of how we moved from EMPA to Technopark.
We had a small van where we put some plants and a sofa, as well as documents and our computers. Gregor, our former executive director, went by bike to the new office to help us unpack. Me and my former colleague, Linda, sat in the van and Tereza, another former colleague, drove around Zürich, trying to find the right way to Technopark.
Back then we did really everything ourselves. We had our first apéro in Technopark and me and Linda carried the big apéro food plates from Migros to the office in our hands. We baked the cookies ourselves and prepared gift bags. Also, our summer BBQs were simple but fun. We went shopping and carried the food to the park and prepared the BBQ ourselves.
If Tarja’s ecoinvent story inspires you, check out our careers page for more information about our current job openings. You can read more milestone stories on our blog.
Batteries power our everyday lives, from mobile phones to electric cars. At ecoinvent, we are committed to expanding our batteries sector and ensuring it is up to date.
At the heart of this discussion is how industries can make batteries themselves more sustainable, particularly regarding electric vehicles (EVs). Often promoted as a cleaner, greener way to travel privately, EV sales surged by 35% in 2022, but answers to the disposal and recycling of EV batteries are still strongly sought after.
High-quality, scientific data will be integral to the effort to optimize sustainable outcomes in battery production and disposal. The ecoinvent database provides annually updated data on many aspects of the battery supply chain, including treatment and recycling at the end-of-life phase.
The ecoinvent database contains over one hundred datasets for the batteries sector, including lithium, iron, and phosphate battery technology, and datasets on individual battery components such as cathodes, anodes, battery management systems, and more. This data supports life cycle assessments, carbon footprint calculations, and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for various products and services.
In our latest video, which you can watch below, our battery experts present more information on this topic. Meet Lauriane Bichot, Data Analyst, and Antonio Valente, Project Manager, in their element as they describe batteries sector developments and the ecoinvent database.
As we work towards a more sustainable future, the ecoinvent database will continue to expand to better serve the needs of its communities. We are committed to our mission of enabling our users to understand the environmental impact of their products and to make informed decisions.
Discover the batteries sector of the ecoinvent database to learn how our data supports sustainable decision-making in battery production and use.
Our licenses enable our users to access the ecoinvent database.
We offer Enterprise, Commercial, Developer, and Educational licenses to support our users’ varying needs. To discover the best option, we recommend trying our new license calculator.
Through the license calculator, you will journey through a series of short videos, progressing by clicking answers to questions, and receiving a description of your recommended license at the end.
Try the ecoinvent license calculator today, or consult our licenses page for pricing information.
A couple of weeks have passed since Climate Week NYC 2024, and as I reflect on the events and discussions that took place, I am reminded of the urgency surrounding every session and conversation. One quote from the week has stuck with me. Veteran ABC meteorologist Ginger Zee opened the week with a stark reminder: “We no longer have time to react like in previous years. We have to react now.” This sentiment echoed throughout the week as Zee spoke about her experience covering hurricanes, where the usual five-day lead time has shrunk dramatically. As she spoke, the Gulf of Mexico produced two of the fastest-forming and most destructive hurricanes on record, back-to-back.
These rapidly intensifying storms underline the pressing need for immediate action. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events highlights the devastating human, infrastructural, and economic toll of climate change. This reality hit home for me during Climate Week and the days since I returned. It was a stark reminder that our work is more critical than ever.
By the end of the week, discussions had shifted towards broader environmental impacts. At the World Climate Foundation’s Biodiversity Summit, there was a strong focus on the intersection between climate change and biodiversity. Dr. Harvey Locke, who moderated the keynote, delivered an insightful reminder about the interconnectedness of climate and nature. He pointed out three key points that should frame our thinking:
This resonated deeply with me. After returning from Climate Week last year, I reflected on the role of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in addressing the climate crisis. This year, the discussions around biodiversity solidified the importance of a holistic approach. Limiting LCA to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions alone risks missing the bigger picture. Climate and nature are inextricably linked, and the broad insights that LCA offers are crucial in understanding and mitigating this interconnected crisis.
A key takeaway came from Professor Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who presented his latest findings. He emphasized that “land use change reduces the ability of natural systems to take up carbon.”
This statement underscored the role that broad-spectrum LCA data plays in capturing the full scope of environmental impacts. Companies must look beyond carbon in their reporting because addressing the climate challenge requires a comprehensive view of how land use, biodiversity, and emissions are interwoven.
On the topic of reporting, I noticed a shift in the conversations this year. There was less worry about how to report and more focus on the challenges of scaling these processes effectively. At the WBCSD Pathway to Action for Climate Transparency (PACT) Summit, I joined over 100 corporates, service providers, and non-profits to discuss the complexities of reporting Scope 3 emissions. The consensus was clear: Transitioning to a PACT methodology could offer a more accurate representation of real-world operations. The need to standardize reporting while making it adaptable for diverse sectors is something I found particularly valuable in the conversations.
I was fortunate to continue the discussion with Naama Avni Kadosh from PACT the next day. We exchanged insights on leading mission-driven organizations and explored the shared goals that PACT and ecoinvent are working towards. These discussions are vital for moving the needle on corporate transparency and accountability.
Of course, Climate Week is not only about discussions in plenary sessions; it’s also a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with partners and friends. I had a chance to join a Scope 3 workshop alongside Altana, Climate Trace, and Epoch Blue, where Walmart, Mars, and Teralytiquie were active participants. Additionally, I met with several key partners, including Watershed, Persefoni, S&P, SAP, and the GHG Protocol, to explore new opportunities for collaboration.
It was also great to catch up with former colleagues from Siemens. And on a personal note, I’m proud to say I completed a lap around Central Park faster than last year. Not too bad for an old guy!
One final reflection: In every room I walked into during Climate Week, at least one person knew about ecoinvent. After two and a half years in this role, it still amazes me to see how far-reaching our database has become. To think that a dedicated team based in Zürich is producing a resource that is so critical to organizations worldwide fills me with immense pride. Well done to everyone at ecoinvent for your continued hard work and commitment to making a global impact.
Climate Week NYC reminds us of the immense challenges ahead and the collective momentum and determination driving us forward. Let’s keep the conversations going and, more importantly, keep scaling the positive environmental momentum we are building.
— Nickolas Meyer, CEO of ecoinvent
Life cycle assessments are fundamental for effective sustainability action—from comparing the environmental impacts of similar products to highlighting critical emissions in the production, use, or end-of-life phase of a product or service.
In our short video, we use the ecoinvent database to calculate the total global warming potential associated with the production and shipping of a simple bamboo toothbrush, its cardboard packaging, and its shipment to Zurich.
This is a cradle-to-gate analysis, meaning that the video covers the beginning of the supply chain up to the point of use. We do not cover the emissions created by the use or disposal of the toothbrush.
Learn more about our life cycle inventory database and our license offerings.