Natcap plans to integrate ecoinvent’s industry–leading Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database into its methodology, enhancing the scalability, credibility, and coverage of its nature-related impact assessments.  

This will enhance Natcap’s ability to model impact intensity and magnitude scores across commodities and supply chains with greater precision. 

Quotes on the Partnership

Read Natcap’s press release to learn more about…

– Solving the Coverage and Scalability Challenge 

– The benefits of embedding ecoinvent’s LCI data into a data platform 

– How Natcap’s platform supports organizations towards sustainability 

ecoQuery now features semantic search, a smarter way to find life cycle inventory data that understands what you mean, not just what you type. Users no longer need to recall precise search terms to retrieve the information they need quickly.

Why Easier Search Matters for LCA Practitioners

Time spent hunting for the right dataset can slow down or impact the precision of your assessments. Semantic search lowers the barrier to finding exactly what you need, whether you are a seasoned ecoinvent user or exploring the database for the first time. It’s especially useful when working across sectors or in unfamiliar territory.

Try Our New ecoQuery Search Feature

Semantic search is now live. Log into ecoQuery and search for previously hard-to-locate datasets—like “aluminum recycling” or “biofuel production”—and see how semantic search surfaces relevant datasets instantly.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Let us know how semantic search works for you.

In 2024, we advanced our mission to support science-based environmental assessments through growth, participation, and evolution. We share our achievements with you in our latest publication.

Last year, our organization grew to over eighty dedicated professionals, each supporting the development of ecoinvent activities through their talents and skills. Many of these individuals attended events around the world, furthering our mission to promote and support the availability of high-quality environmental data worldwide.

In November 2024, we released version 3.11 of the ecoinvent database, the world’s most transparent life cycle inventory database. This update brings a wealth of new and updated data across various sectors, ensuring our stakeholders have access to the most comprehensive and reliable data. Additionally, we improved ecoQuery with an updated design and features to support our users’ needs.

Looking forward, we will continue to invest in our database and innovative solutions to support our stakeholders in making data-driven, impactful decisions.

Thank you for your ongoing support and trust.

Interested in ecoinvent news throughout the year? Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter today.

This week marks the release of the all-new, overhauled ecoQuery. Alongside the many improvements to search, navigation, data display, and more that we’re launching with this update, this release also moves ecoQuery to follow our design system.

User interfaces, or UIs, are the parts of a product or application that users interact with. In short – it’s the visible and interactive portion of an app. Good UI is essential to building successful products.

What Is a Design System?

A design system is a toolkit for creating consistent and cohesive designs across a product or brand. It includes reusable components, guidelines, and standards that help teams build interfaces faster and more effectively.

Think of it as a recipe book: It defines the ingredients (like colors, typography, and icons) and the instructions (rules and patterns) for putting them together. This ensures that everything looks and works well, no matter who designs or writes the code to implement it.

The anatomy of a piece of UI. A design system codifies styles, color, spacing, and more to ensure a consistent user experience.

Why Is This Important?

Environmental decisions depend on reliable and understandable data.

Our fundamental belief is that environmental data is complex. This is an inevitable consequence of trying to model all types of commercial and industrial activity in a cohesive, structured manner. Despite this, it’s both our challenge and goal to present the ecoinvent database in a transparent yet uncomplicated way. As our portfolio of apps grows, we need a standard set of components, guidelines, and rules to do that consistently. This is what motivated us to create the ecoinvent UI design system.

Getting the Fundamentals Right

We believe good design is based on a strong foundation of good practice and thoughtful, inclusive perspectives:

• Accessibility: Everyone should be able to use and understand environmental data. Inclusive design ensures usability for diverse audiences, including those with both permanent and temporary disabilities.
• Clarity and Transparency: Simplifying complexity makes data actionable. Clean visualizations and prioritized information help users focus on what matters most. Our design system prioritizes clarity of information over aesthetics, with a robust hierarchy and opinionated layout (that’s not to say we don’t think our apps are beautiful!).
• Space: Everything benefits from room to breathe. Complex concepts and data can be broken down into more understandable pieces; cognitive load can be reduced, and locating specific values or items in a list can be easier – we believe that spacing is one of the most powerful tools we have to make our data more valuable to a broader audience.

Looking Ahead

We first (quietly) introduced our design system in early 2024 with the release of our updated Accounts platform. Since then, we have rolled this out to other sites, including our Data Glossary, a comprehensive collection of the Master Data items that underpin the ecoinvent database.

With this overhaul of ecoQuery, our design system now powers all our user interfaces at ecoinvent and sets the standard for new apps in the future. We’ll continue to iterate on this system going forward, looking for better and better ways to provide a foundation for understanding environmental data through design.

ecoQuery allows our users to access the ecoinvent database and empowers them to leverage high-quality environmental data for informed decision-making and life cycle assessments.

Our platform has been enhanced with the following updates:

• New Home Page: Our new home page is designed to facilitate your exploration. Users can now browse by sector, new, or popular datasets, and new users will benefit from our new guidance section with links to helpful resources.
• Improved Search: Generate better, more useful suggestions through search. It is now possible to search by product name, activity name, or CAS number.
• Easier Overview of Results: We have organized the results overview to reduce duplication and improve readability. Impact scores are also included in search results for users with a version 3.10 license or later.
• Updated Design: ecoQuery has been refreshed with a contemporary interface that supports our users’ experiences with a design. The new side menu allows users to navigate with ease.

Our users are at the heart of our innovation efforts. We incorporate your feedback and work to continuously improve our products to better suit your needs. If you have any questions regarding using ecoQuery, please get in touch with us.

Accessing ecoinvent data

Access to the ecoinvent database requires a license. Use our License Calculator to discover which license type is right for you, or consult our licenses page for pricing information.

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)

ecoinvent and ORIENTING

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:

• D3.1 – Data Ontologies: Documentation of the ORIENTING LCSA Ontology (ORIONT)

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.

• D3.2 – Data Specification: Specifications for a Future LCSA Data Format

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.

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:

• Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024 | 16:00 – 17:00 CET | Register
• Wednesday, December 4th, 2024 | 10:00 – 11:00 CET | Register

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.