For their oral presentation on "The environmental relevance of capital goods in life cycle assessments of products and services" at the InLCA/LCM conference in Washington D.C. in October 2006, the ecoinvent team was honored with the Best Methodological Contribution Award for their extraordinary work. The study discusses the environmental importance of infrastructure contributions in LCA studies and provides recommendations when to include capital goods in the assessments.
An ecoinvent workshop was given at the 2nd CILCA conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil in February 2007. The workshop included a training for interested Latin-American LCA practitioners on how to efficiently adapt ecoinvent unit process LCI datasets to Latin-American conditions. The workshop participants recognized the ecoinvent methodology and data as an excellent starting point to set up own regionally representative datasets for different economic sectors.
In April 2007, the British Environment Agency launched their new software WRATE (Waste and Resources Assessment Tool for the Environment) which builds its vital backbone on the ecoinvent database. WRATE is an LCA software tool for comparing different management systems treating municipal solid waste with high level of sophistication of technical development.
Acknowledged LCA researchers and practitioners in the field of building and construction value the ecoinvent database as the most consistent high-quality LCA database. Already implemented in several building and construction eco-design tools such as LEGEP and OGIP, the ecoinvent database is accepted as the most important point of reference. Gerhard Piringer, Assistant Professor at Tulane University, USA, comments on his successful experience with ecoinvent Data: "In my research on the environmental impact of building materials, I value the ecoinvent database for three reasons. First, the database has helped me tremendously in modelling the end-of-life phase, with its calculation tool that yields disposal inventories of custom-defined waste streams. Second, it is always instructive to compare ecoinvent inventories to similar inventories from other databases to assess their quality. Third, ecoinvent consistently incorporates uncertainty information and infrastructure inventories, and this increases the quality of impact assessment results and their interpretation. To me, the ecoinvent database is the benchmark for life-cycle inventory databases."