In late 2000 the project ECOINVENT 2000 has officially been launched. Several Swiss federal agencies and nine institutes of the ETH domain agreed on a joint effort to harmonise and update life cycle inventory (LCI) data for its use in life cycle assessment (LCA). Life cycle assessment is a technique for assessing the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product from resource extraction to final disposal. For that purpose a central database will be developed building on past experiences with a large network-based LCI database developed at ETH Zuerich. The database will comprise LCI data from the energy, transport, building materials, chemicals, paper and pulp, waste treatment and agricultural sector. The content of the database will be made publicly available via the web. Two technical aspects are highlighted, namely the data exchange and the computation of LCA results. XML-technology is applied for the data exchange between the institutes and between them and the central database. This allows for a flexible solution and gives the opportunity to consider the particularities of different LCA software products on the market. Matrix inversion is used to calculate the cumulative LCA data using efficient algorithms and making use of the fact that LCA matrices are usually sparse.
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