Table of contents - Ekoconception

Building

Textile

Energy

Food Industry

Ecotoxicity Footprint

IT Studio

Table of contents Food Industry

Eco-design food industry products: the Aquaconception project trains and assists seafood products companies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p2

PEF T-shirts, latest news! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p3

Textile

IT Studio

SMEs, the European Commission produces an environmental footprint tool specially for you. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p4

Ecotoxicity Footprint

Call for applications: ecotoxicity footprinting of cosmetic and detergent products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p5 570 000 ecotox tests, the REACH data boost the AiiDA database! .. . . p6

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Life Cycle Assessment

Cycleco Newsletter #002 - May 2014

by Bastien Evon Life cycle assessment project manager at Cycleco

Eco-design food industry products: the Aquaconception project trains and assists seafood products companies Pole Aquimer, Cycleco and the innovation platform Nouvelles-Vagues launched the Aquaconception project to allow the seafood sector companies to integrate an ecodesign approach to improve their products and production systems. The program aims to increase the level of life cycle thinking maturity for companies in the sector of aquatic products.

The goal is to assist companies in the sector of aquatic products in their efforts to implement eco-design and environmental labeling, so that they can improve their environmental strategy in order to increase their competitiveness and meet the prerogatives of sustainable development. The Aquaconception program is an experimental pilot with the particularity to offer a double axis of capacity building: for companies but also for innovation’s actors whose role is to assist them. A group of several companies in the sector of aquatic products has been selected and are assisted in their ecodesign or environmental labeling project.

Photo: Dan Barbus


For more information on this project, please contact: bastien.evon(at)cycleco.eu 

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Photo by: Cycleco

by Sandrine Pesnel Life cycle assessment project manager at Cycleco

PEF T-shirts, latest news! The 1st consultation phase of the T-shirts pilot ended March 28, 2014. This consultation aimed to gather comments and feedback from the stakeholders regarding the early stages of the European environmental footprint experiment. High participation

More to come …

A consultation meeting was held on Friday, March 14, 2014 in Brussels to present the work of the technical secretariat to the stakeholders (see photo). Around thirty organisations (federations, companies, associations) were present. The T-shirts pilot is held by Promod, Decathlon, Devernois, Pimkie and La Redoute (retailers), Teintures et Apprêts Danjoux (TAD) and Les Tissages de Charlieu (LTC) (manufacturers), the Federal Office for the Environment in Switzerland (FOEN) and the French Ministry for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy (MEDDE) (public authorities). The following items were submitted to consultation: study of the existing PCRs (Product Category Rules), scope of the T-shirts PEFCR (description of the product category, unit of analysis and reference flow), and definition of the representative product.

Submitted comments will now be handled by the technical secretariat. The final version will be considered at the next PEF steering committee meeting scheduled May 19 and 20, 2014. Three other consultation phases are planned for the next stages of the experiment. We invite you to join the consultation group (enterprises and especially SMEs); in order to do so, please contact this address: textile(at)cycleco.eu 

Environmental footprinting for europe A call for volunteers was launched in May 2013 by the European Commission to implement the Product Environmental Footprint for different industrial sectors. Among the 90 proposals, 14 were selected by the European Commission to participate in the experiment, including the “T-shirts” pilot. This three-year experiment shall demonstrate how it is possible to quantify and


communicate the environmental footprint of products. The T-shirts pilot began on November 4th, 2013. It concerns the development of the T-shirts PEFCR (Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules; methodology describing how to calculate the environmental impacts of T-shirts). Different systems will be tested for verifying the environmental assertions, and several approaches for

B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) communication are tested. The work of the T-shirts pilot is subjected to 4 public consultations planned throughout the experiment. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ eussd/smgp/pef_pilots.htm

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Photo: David Sim

by Sergio Rupena Information technologies manager at Tools

© Photo : Thomas Bresson

SMEs, the European Commission produces an environmental footprint tool specially for you Cycleco was selected by the European Commission to manage the development of the SME Support Tools project. The aim of this project is to develop software applications that allow the calculation of environmental impacts of products and organizations. The European environmental footprint experiment will lead to the development of the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) and the Organization Environmental Footprint Sector Rules (OEFSRs). To facilitate the use of the PEFCRs and the OEFSRs, the European Commission launched, on January 8 2014, the SME Support Tools project. The aim is to develop software applications for SMEs to calculate the environmental impacts of products and organizations according to the PEFCRs and the OEFSRs. The project was presented at the last steering committee and a webinar took place on March 28 2014, introducing the software concept to all the stakeholders. Deliverables 4 software applications will be delivered by the end of 2015. They will cover 2 PEFCRs and 2 OEFSRs and will be based upon a common infrastructure which will ensure compliance with the PEF/OEF methodology and will support the integration of product/sectorial specific PEFCRs/OEFSRs.


Easy to use software The tools will provide a simple user interface that allows the SMEs to get productive quickly. Emphasis will be put on the access of the SMEs such that the users won’t require Life Cycle Assessment expertise in order to use the software. The final software will be standalone desktop applications available on all major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) and downloadable free of charge. Click here for the webinar PowerPoint presentation http://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/smgp/ pdf/14-03-28%20webinar-final.pdf Click here for the video of the webinar http://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/videos/ sme-tools-webinar-28-3-2014.wmv 

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by Emmanuel Maillard Impact assessment project manager at Cycleco © Photo : Thomas Bresson

Detergent and cosmetics ecotoxicity footprint, ADEME supports the companies’ first evaluations! You represent a company in the cosmetics or detergent sector, you want to calculate the ecotoxicity footprint for one or more formulations: the ADEME can financially help you for this project. Call for applications In its third phase, the Cosmede project implements the impact modelling method previously developed. A call for application was launched to provide the possibility to calculate the ecotoxicity footprint of formulations. It relates to companies that produce or distribute cosmetic and detergent products. Whether in the context of a Life Cycle Assessment already completed, or in a new evaluation framework, these Photo: Martin Kozák companies benefit from the aid of an independent consultancy firm to calculate the ecotoxicity footprint of one or several products and to be trained to the impact modelling of products. For this, they receive a financial aid of 50% from the ADEME.

The ecotoxicity footprint using the Usetox model The assessment is performed with the Usetox model. This model, developed under the auspices of the « UNEP- SETAC Life Cycle Initiative », is the result of the work of several multidisciplinary researchers in the world. In parallel of the activities of the overall model development and the addition of new features by the Usetox team, Cycleco works since 2011 on the practical application of the model by industries. This practice is carried out through environmental labeling of ecotoxicity footprint of consumer products in France, for the sector of detergents, cosmetics and food. This application of the model requires adapting the methodology of impact assessment of products from different industrial sectors, ensuring transparency and traceability of characterization factors and developing new ecotoxicity footprint factors of chemicals not evaluated. For more information, please contact Emmanuel Maillard at: emmanuel.maillard(at)cycleco.eu 


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by Odilon Hugonnot IT database project manager at Tools

570 000 ecotox tests, the REACH data boost the AiiDA database! 570 000 aquatic ecotox tests results, 22 000 covered substances, 16 000 experimental PNEC, 14 000 PNEC statistics (HC5) and SSD (HC50), the regulation on the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of CHemicals (REACH) has made public hundreds of thousands ecotox tests results in December 2013. The AiiDA database (Aquatic Impact Indicator DAtabase) now takes into account this new data and exponentially increases its chemical substances coverage. Getting ecotoxicity data is a struggle

The ecotoxicological indicators gathered in AiiDA are:

Despite efforts done since 30 years to run ecotoxicity tests for thousands of substances, it is still difficult to get a clear perception of the potential risk or impact of a chemical substance. The lack and the difficulty of access to ecotoxicologic data, as well as the complexity of the implementation of calculation and methods, make the use of the representativity of aquatic ecotoxicity indicators difficult.

 HC50 (Hazardous Concentration 50%) calculated with the AMI (Assessment of Mean Impact) method for more than 10 000 HC50 Acute and Chronic.

AiiDA has a solution

 PNEC (Predicted no-effect Concentration), calculated with the recommendations of the Technical Guidance Document on Risk Assessment (EU, 2003).

To overcome this issue, AiiDA provides more than 570 000 unique and referenced ecotoxicological tests on more than 3 600 species and 30 phyla. This global database is used to automatically calculate the different ecotoxicological indicators as well as their uncertainties according to the official Technical Guidance Document (TGD). A large data panel AiiDA covers 22 000 molecules, including 14 000 with an ecological representativity of 3 phyla or more. The tested species are directly linked to the ITIS database (Integrated Taxonomic Information System) and can be classified according to their geographical origin.

 HC5 and its confidence interval (Hazardous Concentration 5%) calculated with the Aldenberg method (2000) or the SSD (Species Sensitivity Distribution) extrapolation method of US-EPA (2005).

Easy to consult data The calculated values are available on an Internet interactive platform, allowing to maintain the traceability of the calculations and to go back to all the used tests sources. This traceability, which did not exist before, is a great value for ecoconception and gives a true coherence of the indicators. The experimental data given by AiiDA, allow to search data for risk assessment as well as to produce indicators for the USEtox impacts evaluation model or for the calculation of risk indicators (PNEC, HC5) with a corresponding uncertainty. The AiiDA platform can also produce SSD and PSD curves (Species and Phyla Sensitivity Distribution) of the different molecules and compare their ecotoxicity. To access the database: http://aiida.tools4env.com/ecotox/database You can register to the presentation and the first training of AiiDA 3.0 planned as a free webinar on Tuesday 17th of June 2014 at 2 pm. To register, please send an e-mail to odilon. hugonnot(at)tools4env.com 


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EKOCONCEPTION is a news platform about eco-design, life cycle assessment and environmental footprinting.

www.ekoconception.eu/en


In 2009, Jérôme Payet decided to create an independant consulting office: CYCLECO Cycleco is specialized in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Ecodesign of products.

www.cycleco.eu

Tools for Environment (Tools4Env) was launched in 2009 on an initiative of engineers and doctors from the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausane). The company is specialized in the development of Environmental Footprint software and managing, computing, structuring environmental databases.

www.tools4env.com