Environmental Footprint - PEF and OEF

The European Commission launched the Environmental Footprint (EF) initiative under the Single Market Act, with a focus on green products. It is designed to harmonize the many different methodologies that are available to calculate and communicate environmental information on products and organizations, covering the entire life cycle from cradle to grave and a wide range of environmental issues including climate change, land use, ecotoxicity, particulate matter and others.

The environmental footprint guide published by the initiative describes how to calculate and communicate the environmental impact of products and organizations.

• Based on a European Commission Recommendation to the EU member States of 2013, the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) guides, which were used during the pilot phase until 2018, recently replaced by the December 2019 Recommendation, can now be applied during the current transition phase until 2024.
  
  
• About 20 Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) and Organisation Environmental Footprint Sector Rules (OEFSR) documents have been developed in this process, together with industry producers and other private sector and governmental organizations.
  
  
• These PEFCRs and OEFSRs specify how to implement PEF and OEF studies on the covered products and sectors.
  
  
• They cover the product groups beer, dairy, decorative paints, hot and cold water supply pipe systems, intermediate paper products, feed for food producing animals, IT equipment, leather, packed water, pasta, pet food, photovoltaic electricity production, rechargeable batteries, t-shirts, uninterruptable power supply, wine, metal sheets, and insulation.
  
  
• Two OEFSRs have also been completed: copper and retail.
  
  
• Five more PEFCRs are currently under development, expected until mid-2023, same as updates on the above-listed pilots PEFCRs/OEFSRs to start. A range of EU policy developments is on-going in parallel.
  
  
• All of the official and final PEFCRs and OEFSRs, as well as supporting materials, can be found here.

Read more about the Environmental Footprint on Environmental Footprint (EF) Consulting - Sphera!

Calculate and communicate your product’s or organization’s environmental footprint with GaBi Software

Get ready for product and organization environmental footprint with GaBi Software and LCA Databases.

ILCD – compliant data format, documentation and EF 2.0 flow nomenclature, and also EF 3.0

Communicate – to stakeholders in required format

Easy – and open data exchange across your value chain

Faster – reporting and communication

GaBi Software users are positioned well to do a PEF or OEF—all the requirements specified for the EF pilot phase and the on-going transition phase have been implemented and are available in the current GaBi Software and LCA Databases—they can be used by companies to implement PEF and OEF studies:

Data exchange among LCA software systems under the EF uses the ILCD format and the latest EF 2.0 and EF 3.0 flow list.

All official EF secondary data sets from the pilot phase are provided in ILCD format with the EF 2.0 flow list.

You can use the EF 2.0 and the EF 3.0 LCIA methods to calculate impact results.

GaBi software supports both the import and export of ILCD formatted datasets, performs the mapping from and to the EF 2.0 and alternatively the EF 3.0 flows, has the EF 2.0 and EF 3.0 LCIA methods implemented and even allows users to conveniently document data sets directly in GaBi in ILCD format, which is moreover also mandatory under the EN 15804 for sustainability assessment and related EPDs of construction products!

All this is essential not only to save your valuable working time in the creation of PEF and OEF results, but is a prerequisite for sharing them with reviewers and with stakeholders, including the mandatory publication of the aggregated PEF or OEF results dataset of your study.

Use the EF v2.0 Database (Environmental Footprint Database v2.0) in GaBi

Two Environmental Footprint Data Packages are available from Sphera (for technical reasons still under the former name “thinkstep”) that combine the seven Sphera data packages for the EF secondary data packages (thirteen in total) into two larger packages. The availability of the complementing data from the other developers is under preparation.

The EF 3.0 data will be made available as soon as possible after all datasets have been officially approved by the Commission; for fee-based use outside the free use cases, license agreement are foreseen to be established among the EF data providers.


Find out more!