Speaker
Description
This presentation explores Ecobalyse, France's public platform for environmental impact assessment, examining its strategic positioning and technical implementation. As a cornerstone of France's environmental labeling policy, Ecobalyse democratizes LCA methodology for businesses of all sizes.
Ecobalyse emerged from a critical policy imperative: scaling up environmental labeling across French industries. ADEME and the ministry were facing two main challenges :
- Limitation of PEF and LCA indicators : it was necessary to define a new metric, based on LCA/PEF but also dealing with its current limitation (ex: local biodiversity). A tool was necessary to build the “French environmental price”.
- Scalability and transparency: traditional LCA tools present barriers—complexity, cost, and accessibility challenges that prevent non-LCA experts and SME’s from participating to the methodological testing, discussion and eventually disclosing ecolabelling.
Ecobalyse addresses this by providing a simplified, open, government-backed "Level 1" assessment tool enabling rapid environmental impact calculations based on easily accessible parameters.
By lowering entry barriers, Ecobalyse catalyses market transformation, encouraging businesses to engage with environmental assessment as a first step toward more comprehensive LCA practices.
Ecobalyse's technical architecture demonstrates innovative approaches to LCA data management and computational efficiency. The platform leverages multiple data sources, including ecoinvent for generic processes, AGRIBALYSE for agricultural products and some custom datasets for textile manufacturing, ensuring coverage and quality. By relying partly on ecoinvent private data, we ensure data coverage and quality; but it comes at a price of following ecoinvent licence conditions and IP rights. Public policies would highly benefit of broader opendata availability, which is raising the question of funding mechanisms.
Integration with Brightway framework enables the platform to automate calculation and adjust data in an agile manner; while maintaining our data pipeline resilient. For instance we can create “extrapolated processes” : Brazilian chicken from French chicken; by changing the feed. We adjust pesticide use, by removing forbidden molecules from the inventory (ex: acetamiprid) etc… While Brightway plateform has been a powerful tool, it also came with quite a few challenges and we identify several improvement possibilities.
This case study demonstrates how strategic policy objectives can drive technical innovation in LCA methodology, creating public goods that advance environmental transparency while contributing to the open-source ecosystem.
| How much time do you ideally wish for your contribution? | 30 minutes |
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