The openLCA project will create, in the coming 1.5 years, a modular software for life cycle analysis and sustainability assessments. The software will be available as open source, and will be available for free.

Initially, a basic framework for life cycle assessment (LCA) calculation and two plugins will be implemented, a format converter and an uncertainty module. The format converter serves to convert relevant LCA data formats from one to the other, in a loss-less manner. The uncertainty module will help to specify, calculate, visualise and interprete uncertainty in LCA product systems.

This site provides you an overview of the project; you are invited to browse through background information and to say your opinion; you might be interested to join, as a tester, contributor, or funder - and we are keen to  explain why you should! You will also find download resources, and some words about us. We expect the site to grow with project schedule -  you are invited to join the project newsletter to stay informed.

The documentation of openLCA is now available on the website, here - this is the same documentation that is available in openLCA v1.1.1; we felt that some parts of the documentation, e.g.  how to download and install, fit better outside of the application. Feedback welcome!

January 7 2010: Two notes;

First, our friends from the Open-IO project (www.open-io.org) have made a US Input-Output database available specifically for openLCA (note the different writings of open..) - thanks!. As the current release of openLCA has no money currency, but the IO database contains money flows, you will need to create a unit and flow property before the import, then everything runs smoothly. We have written a short documentation about the import should you need help.

Database download:
Website: http://www.open-io.org/
Download link: http://www.open-io.org/OIO_UnitNonHybrid.zip 

Documentation download here.

Second, you may have noticed that openLCA does not directly support Windows 7 (reason: we need to state each operation system explicitly for the embedded MySQL server). We will fix this in the next couple of days with a new release.

UPDATE: A version for (also) Windows 7 has just been released at the sourceforge site.

December 17 2009: We released today a new version of openLCA with only two corrections / improvements; product systems that contain only one process are now easier to model, and an error in the Beta 1.1 was removed for resources. In Beta 1.1, resources were counted negative (as inputs), and emissions positive (as outputs). For single score methods, this meant that resource demands decreased the overall single score.

This is now changed and corrected in the new release, which you find at the usual sourceforge site: www.sourceforge.net/projects/openlca.

Especially if you use single score methods as for example Eco-Indicator, we recommend downloading this new version.

December 7, 2009

First, thank you all for the overwhelming feedback. It seems the new release is also by you seen as a great improvement. And although the sourceforge stat server was down, and is still lagging behind, it counts 252 downloads of the beta 1.1 since November 19!

We continue working on openLCA (and to this end, also - ideally constructive - criticism is of course welcome). Currently we are seeking help to provide translated versions of openLCA. German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese are already "taken", which leaves many languages open for translation.

We have written a small application to support the translation, and to cope best with a living openLCA application. Use is straightforward, and explained in a quick documentation available here.

If you are interested, please let us know. If you wish, your help will be publicly mentioned. Thanks in advance!

August 27, 2009. A new version of the format converter (see in detail here for the old description) is in preparation. The new version is necessary due to the release of JRC's new ILCD format (formerly ELCD) and also due to the new EcoSpold format version that the ecoinvent centre currently prepares.

We contributed actively to make the conversion for these new formats easier and overall better. Thanks also to the ecoinvent centre and to JRC for taking these our comments and contributions very well into account. As learned lessons from the first version of the converter, the converter will be implemented in Java (allowing more powerful and elegant logic than the previous XSLT) and we will provide mapping lists that allow a direct transfer of, for example, an elementary flow from the ILCD database to the ecoinvent database, adapting then the name and characterisation factors from ecoinvent. This has the effect that the imported elementary flow fits to exsting impact assessment methods and also inventory models. Similar mapping lists will be created for persons, and references.

As yo might expect, we seek support for the implementation. We started the update because we felt an oblogation to do so, and also because in the new formats (ILCD, EcoSpold2) many previous obstacles for a conversion have been removed. But still, it is a lot of effort. The result, the new version of the format converter, will be available as soon as possible, after quality checks, and as free and open source software, similar to the previous release.

The converter has several modules, and each module is available separately for funding and support. You will of course be recognised as a sponsor if you decide to support.

These modules are as follows; some have already found a sponsor (thanks!):

The API will allow any other software to use the converter without user interface, the user interface being provided by the other application. We think this especially interesting for web servers, but it can also be useful for (desktop) LCA applictions.

If you are interested to know more or to sponsor, we would be keen to receive your email or call.

Today, May 23rd, we released a new version on the sourceforge server which corrects errors in the first release concerning LCIA methods. First, it is now possible to delete LCIA methods (!), and second, LCIA characterisation factors are now correctly imported also if elementary flows exist for several compartments.

If you work with imported LCIA models in openLCA we recommend to change to the new release (where, besides the bug fixes, everything else is kept the same).

A more thorouhgly improved, extended and modularised version is under way. More information will be available at the upcoming SETAC LCA meeting in Gothenburg.