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The Life Cycle Assessment methodology often applies a product perspective but can be used to assess novel production technologies by comparing novel products with a baseline product, as long as the functional unit of the product is considered to be the same. There is increasing environmental concerns in society and pressures on industry to take into account their impact on the environment. Tools are available for this, but not tools adapted to specific industry needs. The reasons to use LCA are foremost to guide the development towards the most sustainable solutions and to evaluate the market potential from an environmental perspective. Challenges arise when applying LCA in early development stages, e.g. getting access to recent development data, to increase commitment and incentives to take early LCA results into consideration, to present results in an attractive way etc. LCA calculations must also keep up with the sometimes rapid development. In order to meet these challenges interactive report software have been introduced to industrial partners (non-LCA experts) in an EU project called FutureFood (Grant agreement no: 635759). The project goal is to develop a new processing technology for foods (CO2 drying). In order to meet the LCA related challenges a platform has been used that is developed by PRé Consultants (Pre, 2016?), called Share and Collect. It allows LCA experts to develop tools for non-experts so that users are able to alter parameters in the LCA model and assess the result of the changes. It is done by providing the industrial partners with an intuitive web based graphical user interface (GUI). When a user changes input data in the GUI, parameter values also change in the model, an LCA calculation engine runs the model and the GUI presents the corresponding results. In the project a tool for assessing the processing technology has been developed and the industrial partners are provided rights to access the tools and create ‘what if’ scenarios. Examples of changes are change of electricity production, transport distances, transport types or modes, raw material source, packaging, production resource or energy efficiency etc. The tool has been evaluated by the non-LCA expert industrial partners, and the first review results show that it is user friendly, visually appealing and interesting in its interactive way because of the instant feedback of results. Tailored models such as the ones developed in the project have the potential to support knowledge based decisions in innovation projects in companies. FutureFood |
