USDA LCA Commons Life Cycle Inventory data

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) hosts a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data repository called LCA Commons. The objective of this repository is to assist researchers by providing agricultural LCA datasets. The LCA Commons programme supports access, transparency, reuse and collaboration among researchers. Currently, these data are available via openLCA, but USDA wants to distribute data through other outlets as well in order to reach more researchers.

When integrating the LCA Commons data into Agri-footprint we also enhanced the quality of the data. For example, we simplified the inventories by aggregating some of the field activities, linked activity data to relevant background datasets, and calculated and added relevant elementary flows. Finally, the data have been restructured to align better with the Agri-footprint structure.

365 products and processes

In total about 365 unit process datasets for field crop production, developed by the University of Washington Design for Environment, have been added to Agri-footprint. These include data on cottonseed and cottonlint, groundnuts, maize, oats, rice, soybean and winter, spring and durum wheat. Data are available for the main producing states within the United States. The data are derived from survey data and statistics and are aggregated at the state level.

We are proud to include these LCA Commons crop production data in Agri-footprint, expanding its geographical scope and making valuable and high-quality data available to more LCA researchers.