Assess the environmental impacts of treating your end-of-life products
With strong expertise in product recycling, ecosystem can help you measure the environmental performance of your products at the end of their life cycle.
Estimate the end-of-life carbon footprint of your products
Indispensable for calculating the carbon footprint of an activity, a company, or the equipment it markets, CO2 emission factors are coefficients that translate an action into greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. driving 1 km, producing 1 kg of PP plastic, etc.).
Following a joint project with ADEME, the Empreinte® database now includes CO2 emission factors for the end-of-life management of household waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and lamps.
- Empreinte® database
- Data path: 5. Indirect emissions from products > Waste treatment > Treatment of household and similar waste > WEEE
- Choice of data : in the WEEE section, you must choose the WEEE stream that you generate or where your product will be treated at the end of its life (e.g. "Small mixed appliances" for a toaster or vacuum cleaner, "Large non-cooling equipment" for an oven or washing machine, "Large cooling equipment" for a refrigerator or freezer, etc.)
Exemple :
The end-of-life management of one tonne of equipment from the Small Mixed Appliance (SMA) stream, which includes toasters, hair driers, alarm clocks, electric toothbrushes, power strips, etc., emits an average of 802 kg of CO2. Using the recycled materials derived from these products or the energy recovered, we avoided the emission of 1,670 kg of CO2 that would otherwise have been generated by the manufacture of virgin materials or conventional energy.
To find out exactly what lies behind each factor, go to the "View documentation" section of the Base Empreinte® database.
Accurately assess the end-of-life environmental footprint of your products
To accurately quantify the environmental impact of your product end-of-life management and the potential benefits of recycling, ecosystem has developed a database that is one of its kind in Europe. This database is particularly aimed at users of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software. The integration of this new data into these tools enables rapid, reliable and representative modelling of end-of-life equipment.
Created to encourage, facilitate and promote eco-design, this free database enables you to measure the environmental impact of the end-of-life of your electrical equipment, according to its composition. With over 950 data sets, the database covers 96 materials broken down according to the different WEEE streams managed by ecosystem.
To ensure that the data is representative, ecosystem has modelled the entire end-of-life process, using field data from over 50 WEEE decontamination and treatment sites, and has taken into account some 15 different recovery or disposal channels.
The database alone contains over 950 Life Cycle Inventories (LCI) which can be downloaded from the dedicated ecosystem platform.
The data has been integrated into widely recognised life-cycle assessment software programs, including:
- In SimaPro (developed by Pré consulting): can be loaded into the tool from the library available here
- In EIME (developed by LCIE - Bureau Veritas): Library > End-of-Life treatment >WEEE specific end-of-life treatment > ESR data
This free, open-access database makes it possible to take effective action when choosing materials based on their end-of-life impacts.
If you have any questions about this data or its use, please contact us at : weee-lci@ecosystem.eco