Product-Specific LCA Data Solicited

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is inviting building product manufacturers to submit data about their manufacturing processes for the forthcoming version of the BEES life-cycle assessment (LCA) software. The new “BEES Please” program aims to include product-specific LCA results alongside the more generic, industry-average data featured in the current version. If successful, this venture should make BEES useful as a tool for comparing specific products while also increasing the reliability of its more generic data.

To participate, companies fill out a life-cycle inventory spreadsheet—a tabulation of the energy, water, and material inputs into their manufacturing processes, and the air emissions, effluents, and solid waste outputs from those processes. “We’re not asking them for data on their suppliers—just data from within their gates,” reports Bobbie Lippiatt, BEES project manager at NIST. Some larger companies are hiring consultants to assist them with the data reporting, says Lippiatt, while small manufacturers can take advantage of free support from NIST’s contractor on this project: PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In addition to supplying the data, companies must pay a fee of either $4,000 or $1,000 per product, depending on whether they wish their product to be assessed across all 10 environmental impact categories in BEES 2.0, or just the original 6 categories from version 1.0. These fees are discounted for companies submitting multiple products with processes in common, reports Lippiatt.