Distributed knowledge
Sustainability intelligence requires knowledge that is both broad and deep. We are creating the tools that allow collaboration across industries while protecting the privacy of your data.
Consumers and businesses alike have a desire to make smart choices. When it comes to sustainability, it can be very hard to get an accurate picture of what choice is “best” in any given situation. A decision to use, buy, or discard something can be effortless at the moment of consideration, but the impacts of that decision can be felt far away and for a long time. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a scientific methodology whose purpose is to illuminate the drivers of environmental impacts, as well as the uncertainties and trade-offs between options. Done well, it can be a valuable source of intelligence for a consumer or a business.
But LCA is hard to do well. Preparing an LCA study requires broad familiarity with the details of the system under study, including its production, use, end-of-life disposal, and the structure of its supply chain, but also deep expertise in the methods and practice of LCA.
For many years, LCA software systems have focused on the deep expertise required, leaving the breadth of real-world knowledge “out of scope”. Partly as a consequence, LCA has not yet become the powerful decision-support tool that we all aspire to use.
Antelope Software
We designed the Antelope LCA software framework from the ground up to radically change the way LCA computation is performed. The task of performing LCA is divided up into smaller problems, each of which can be managed independently.
Index - access our extensive catalog to find data resources that you need, evaluate fitness for purpose, and compare across scopes
Exchange - our exchange database or “xdb” stores individual inputs and outputs that make up the core content of life cycle inventory databases
Background - Exchange data and index information are applied to construct an inventory matrix, which is sorted using a uniquely powerful graph ordering method to reveal the structure of the data
Quantity - our quantity database or “qdb” defines flows – their properties, characteristics, and environmental impacts, on a regionalized basis
Foreground - spin up a private “oryx” server to build and run your models by marshaling information from the other interfaces
Our software is designed to be used in and from the cloud, but an open-source version called antelope.py is available to be run from your local python console. Open and access datasets using ecospold v1 or v2, OpenLCA JSON-LD, ILCD, and SimaPro csv formats.
Open source and available
Install antelope_core from the python package index and perform fully-featured LCA analysis in seconds.
