Tool
Construction, Consumer Goods, Plastics, Manufacturing,
SMEs that want to quickly and easily measure the environmental impact of their products
By understanding the environmental impact your products make across the life cycle, you can also discover how to improve it. In the tool, for example, you can easily play with material choices and interventions to come up with new more sustainable design strategies.
You can now quickly and easily assess the environmental impact of products yourself using the new self-assessment tool for life cycle assessments: the Environmental Impact Tool. This tool enables small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to make better decisions that contribute to a sustainable and circular economy. TNO developed this tool in collaboration with CIRCO and LBP | Sight, with support from the Circular Manufacturing Industry Implementation Program (UPCM).
Sustainability is a topic of conversation at many companies. To become more sustainable, it is essential to know the environmental impact of organizations and products. Life cycle analyses offer a solution for this. But these are specialized, expensive and time-consuming. This is often a barrier for companies to start measuring and improving their environmental impact.
TNO, CIRCO, and LBP | Sight have pooled their knowledge and experience into the Environmental Impact Tool. This tool makes it easy for manufacturing companies, logistics service providers, and repair shops to gain insight into their environmental impact. Companies can use the tool to quickly and easily conduct a basic assessment of their products and services.
The tool is freely available to everyone. In this way, the partners aim to encourage organizations to adopt sustainable and circular practices.
The Environmental Impact Tool can model and analyze one or more life cycle stages. This provides insight into the sources of a product’s environmental impact. You can also compare different scenarios. For example, you can assess the impact of extending a product’s lifespan or highlight the differences between two product designs.
A unique feature of the tool is that it is transparent about the data and scenarios used. This makes it immediately clear what is being calculated. In addition, the tool allows you to add your own data.
The results provide concrete solution directions for making product designs more sustainable. Precisely because a life cycle analysis (LCA) is complex, the tool uses simplified representations. This does mean that for a more precise understanding it is still advisable to engage a consultant in the field of LCAs or environmental product declarations.
Go to the tool You go to a Dutch versionThe circular economy does not arise by itself. CIRCO (a program of TKI-CLICKNL) focuses on getting a new market moving. CIRCO therefore activates - with the support of the government - entrepreneurs and creative professionals to (re)design products, services and business models in order to then do circular business.
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TNO is the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research. As part of its mission, TNO undertakes many activities in the domain of Circular Economy, such as developing (recycling) technology, analyzing environmental impact and economic consequences of policy ambitions, and providing insight into the consequences of new technology (ICT) on sustainability and circularity.
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