Life Cycle Inventory Data on timber Supply Chains
Life Cycle Inventory Data on timber Supply Chains
Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) Data on emissions and waste from timber supply chains is a prerequisite to produce the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) required to enable producers and importers to make Environmental Products Declarations (EPD) required by the European construction sector.
The EPD´s are required to make Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) on anything from housing to large scale construction under the EU Energy Performance and Building Directive (EPBD) or Green Building councils (eg. DGNB). This is an important contribution to the reduction of GHG´s from the construction sector to meet the Paris Agreement.
The requirement for LCI data and LCA´s is however also potentially a serious market barrier for the tropical timber since the production of the fundament- the LCI data requires organisation, know how and funding.
An Amazon Initiative is working to break this potential market barrier through two projects:
Project 1. Building network and Capacity. Uncovering legislation, Product Category Rules and Standards. The aim of this project is to setup a validated methodology for retrieving LCI data and produce Templates for the data collection from FSC certified tropical timber value chains.
Project 2. Based on the results of Project 1 An amazon Initiative will conduct a Proof of Concept on representative value chains in the Amazon in order to produce LCI data on the timber production from FMU via sawmill to the Port of shipment. This includes IPCC Data on Land Use Land Use Change on Forestry (LULUCF).
The project is focused on keeping the methodology simple, the tools low tech and the operating costs low in order to make I accessible for SME´s and community forestry as well.
The validated and tested methodology, the templates and the LCI data will be open source and available for all FSC operators.
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