Sustainable Opportunity

COLUMBUS, OH — A new life cycle assessment (LCA) tool developed by the Ohio State University Center for Resilience brings a new dimension to LCA by taking into account ecosystem services like soil erosion, pollination, flood prevention and cropland.

Eco-LCA is a free, online tool that acts as a complement to other LCA tools by showing how different products and materials have different impacts on nature.

"Typically most LCAs tend to focus on emissions and their impact, and they will account for some natural resources, maybe some fossil fuels, maybe some minerals," said Bhavik Bakshi, an Ohio State University professor who helped develop Eco-LCA. "But what our work and what our tool does is it also tries to account for other services that ecosystems offer."

Those services are divided into four areas: Supporting services (soil, pollination, sunlight, hydropotential, geothermal, wind), regulating services (flood protection, disease regulation, carbon sequestration), provisioning services (fuels, ores, water, timber, cropland), and cultural services (spiritual and recreational benefits).

Eco-LCA is best used to compare items, and the online tutorial provides a walkthrough for comparing paper, foam, ceramic and glass cups.

"The tool itself is going to be coarse," Bakshi said, "so it will give you a rough ballpark of how different products might compare to one another."

Eco-LCA isn't aimed at any specific type of user, he said. "It's for people who are interested in understanding the broader environmental implications of products," Bakshi said, listing off possible users as varied as industrial practitioners, consumers, researchers and policymakers.

Eco-LCA was created and is offered for free thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“It’s exciting that many of these pilot projects -- eight in every 10 -- will revitalize previously built landscapes,” Susan Rieff, executive director of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center said in a statement this week. “We can address the serious environmental challenges the world faces in its existing communities by consciously redeveloping these spaces for ecological health as well as beauty.”

Under the SITES system, locations are rated on a 250-point scale for possible certification at four levels. Points are awarded for elements such as site selection, water, soil, vegetation, materials, human health and well-being, construction and maintenance. Sites attaining 40, 50, 60 or 80 percent of possible points are awarded one-, two-, three- or four-star certification, respectively.

Projects participating in the pilot are in various stages of development; some are still in the design phase, others are near completion. They all have until June 2012 to provide feedback about the benchmarking program to SITES. The data will be used in the certification process for the projects and to revise the assessment system. SITES has a goal of releasing a final version of its rating system and reference guide in 2013.

Details about the projects selected for the pilot are available at www.sustainablesites.org/pilot. More information about the Sustainable Sites Initiative and its rating system is available from "The Sustainable Sites Initiative: Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009." (pdf) and "The Case for Sustainable Landscapes" (pdf).