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.