Completion of the ORIENTING Project

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:

• 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.