SimaPro: a tool for life cycle assessment

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a standardized method for evaluating the environmental impact of a product, as defined by ISO 14040:2006 and ISO 14044:2006.

It calculates a product's environmental footprint at all stages of its life cycle (raw material extraction, manufacturing, transport, use and end-of-life), based on a set of indicators representative of the product's environmental issues (climate change, natural resources, ozone, toxicity, ecotoxicity).

LCA involves researching and manipulating a large number of data and assumptions. The use of software such as SimaPro facilitates the management of these data and scenarios.

Using the example of a bicycle shelter, this article presents the basic functions of SimaPro software: creating and modifying data, creating and modifying calculation methods, and using data to create a product life cycle.

The various databases and calculation methods provided with the software are presented, along with functions that facilitate the processing and calculation of a product's life cycle, such as: graphical illustrations of results, parameterization to vary assumptions, uncertainty calculation to qualify results according to data quality, and the link between SimaPro and another tool to speed up the modeling and calculation of environmental impacts.