Objective of the Working Group
The objective of the working group was to facilitate the electronic exchange of high-quality, easily comparable data on environmental product life cycle inventories (LCI-data) for materials.

Unfortunately, the working group was terminated after its first year of existence, due to lack of funding. This site reports on the interim results, which may serve as inspiration for similar activities to further these objectives in other fora.
 

Work programme and output
The above objective was pursued by three parallel but coordinated activities:

I) Promoting the use of a standardised electronic format for LCI-data, ensuring harmonisation with the relevant ISO standards and procedures, especially furthering collaboration between the ISO TC 184: STEP and TC 207: Environmental management. The working group published its First progress report on the harmonisation of exchange formats for LCI-data in December 1999.

II) To improve the quality and comparability of LCI-data, the CODATA Working Group was to develop, as a supplement to ISO-standard 14041, a recommendation for the procedures to be used for data collection and data treatment, including a list of minimum criteria for data quality documentation. The recommendations was to be published as a guideline. The CODATA Working Group was to suggest a procedure for how data could be validated according to the guideline. A first draft outline was circulated December 1999. The work was carried on by the EU-project CASCADE, resulting in a final procedural guideline.

III) To assess the need for further development, the CODATA Working Group should investigate the current trends in use of LCI-data in industrial design. The requirements of industrial designers and the pitfalls to avoid when applying LCI-data in the design process was to be investigated, as well as the needs and obstacles for integrating LCI-data in electronic tools used in design (CAD), manufacturing (CAM) and product data modelling (PDM). A draft report on the development needs: Use of life cycle data in industrial design was published in December 1999.
 

Working Group members
 

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Last update: 2000.10.11 BW