18 June 2013 marks a further milestone in the history of the ecoinvent Centre.
To date, the ecoinvent Centre has been a competence centre of five Swiss research institutes, namely Agroscope, Empa, EPFL, ETH Zurich and PSI.
Ecoinvent is now an independent association consisting of the five founding institutes as active members. With this step ecoinvent has become a not-for-profit organisation whose goal is to ensure the further development of a consistent, transparent and trustworthy database for the LCA community as well as for creators of eco-design tools, decision-makers, industry and scientific research. Furthermore, this change in its organisational structure allows ecoinvent to be more flexible in its decision making thus ensuring that requests can be dealt with more speedily. In addition, the association provides a stable foundation for the five institutions to continue their work in guaranteeing the availability of transparent, high quality data.
The newly founded not-for-profit association also includes a change in the chair of the ecoinvent board. After 5 years as the chairman of the ecoinvent Board Gérard Gaillard is now stepping down. Gérard Gaillard will remain an active member of the Board. The ecoinvent team would like to thank Gérard for his tireless work and commitment. His successor is Stefanie Hellweg who looks forward to the challenge posed by this newly-appointed role within the Board.
Ecoinvent v3.0 has only just been made available to its users but the ecoinvent Centre is already planning ahead for the next version of the ecoinvent database. As a not-for-profit organisation ecoinvent also relies on third-party data providers to create its high-quality database. Significant
benefits can be accrued from becoming a data provider for ecoinvent. E.g.:
Please contact the ecoinvent team at support@ecoinvent.org if you are interested in providing data to the ecoinvent database. We will be happy to assist you in the process by showing you how to use our tool (ecoEditor) as well as providing you with the ecoSpold 2 format which offers advanced modelling options. We will also ensure that your datasets are reviewed by an expert.
Have we sparked your interest? The upcoming data provider workshop at the LCM 2013 is the ideal opportunity for you to learn first-hand how to become a data provider.
At the LCM 2013 ecoinvent will not only be present with a booth but also host a user meeting and a data provider workshop. The user meeting is the ideal opportunity for you to get to know more about ecoinvent v3: the structure of the database, the differences to ecoinvent v2 as well as the new and updated data in v3. Additionally, the meeting gives you, as a user, the chance to raise questions and participate in an open discussion. Both events are free and will take place in the Clarion Post Hotel, Gothenburg on 29 August. Registration for both or either of the events can be made by writing to support@ecoinvent.org stating your name, organisation and level of experience with LCA.