| EDFix Call #4 – Summary (7:48) |
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| EDFix Call #4 – Full (43:39) |
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On January 11 we talked with Greg Norris and Jeff Rice about the open data requirements and effects of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
They are working to aggregate data across supply chains that would help anyone calculate specific sustainability footprints: think beyond carbon footprints to other footprints for the carcinogenic, water-consumption, fossil-fuel and biodiversity effects that different products and processes have. You could envision analyses for safety, living wages, child labor and community impact.
Early LCA efforts took a physicist's perspective, assessing what compounds a particular process leaves as by-products, for example. Now, using Linked Open Data methods from the semantic web, analyses can take other perspectives, such as an economist's.
The natural question to ask is: why would a corporation share openly the raw data of its supply chain? Doesn't that reveal state secrets? One of the keys to corporate collaboration is focusing on the impacts of the supply chains.
At that level, companies are jumping in. Owens Corning, for example, is funding the open-source Earthster project, which itself just spun out a data-interchange-standards project named Poseidon. (In a future EDFix call, we'll discuss Wal-Mart's Sustainability Index project.)
Existing vendors in the LCA space such as GaBi, SimaPro and OpenLCA are joining the open effort, too. The availability of large amounts of open data should make their software and analytic skills more valuable, not less.
As better structured data meets better analytic tools and deeper frameworks for analysis, our ability to make difficult choices should improve. Now we need to figure out how to boil down those decisions so that normal folks in everyday life can benefit from them, too.
Please join us for our next EDFix call on January 25, at 9am Pacific, on Governing the Commons.
You can also:
- Listen to or download the podcast of the full discussion (44 min)
- Get a taste by listening to or downloading Jerry Michalski's brief summary of the call (8 min)
- Find out how to participate in upcoming EDFix Conference Calls