Life cycle assessment for everyone. Free, and actually easy.
LCA has always meant expensive licenses, specialist training, and weeks per study — so most teams never run one. FreeLCA is none of that. Start from 214 literature-sourced templates across seven industries, change the numbers that matter, and get a credible result in an hour. No license, no LCA degree, no cost.
No credit card · TRACI 2.1 + IPCC AR6 · US & international grids · one-click Excel / report export
5-MGD upgrade · Global Warming
⚡ Aeration energy drives 64% of GWP — the lever to pull is blower efficiency, not the membrane.
- 7
- industries
- 214
- process templates
- 8
- impact categories
- 52
- grid regions
- $0
- to use
LCA for everyone
Life cycle assessment has been locked behind licenses and specialists. We're unlocking it.
A traditional LCA means a five-figure software seat, a trained specialist to drive it, and weeks of modeling — so most teams never run one, and environmental impact stays a guess. FreeLCA removes every one of those barriers: it's free, you start from a vetted template instead of a blank model, and it's built so a planner, a student, or a procurement lead can produce a credible assessment themselves.
LCA the old way
- Five-figure software license
- A trained specialist to run it
- Weeks of modeling per study
- Effectively expert-only
With FreeLCA
- Free — no license, no credit card
- Start from a vetted template, not a blank page
- A credible result in about an hour
- Anyone on the team can run it
Seven sectors, one engine.
The same calculation core, visualizations, and exports — with a template catalog, functional units, and methodology tailored to each industry.
Water & Wastewater
Treatment trains, biosolids, pumping & distribution
Functional unit: per m³ treated
ExploreEnergy & Power
Generation technologies, storage & the grid
Functional unit: per MWh
ExploreTransportation & Fleet
Vehicles, fuels & freight
Functional unit: per km / tonne-km
ExploreWaste & Recycling
Landfill, WtE, composting & recycling
Functional unit: per tonne managed
ExplorePackaging
Formats, materials & end-of-life
Functional unit: per package / per L delivered
ExploreBuildings & Construction
Embodied + operational carbon
Functional unit: per m² floor·yr
ExploreFood & Agriculture
Crops, livestock, processing & beverage
Functional unit: per kg / per serving
ExploreReal questions, answered in an hour.
Every industry is built around the decision you're actually trying to make.
Activated sludge or membrane bioreactor for our 5-MGD upgrade — and what carbon premium comes with the cleaner effluent?
Solar, gas, or coal per MWh on our grid — and how does the embodied-vs-operational split change the answer?
Does a battery-electric transit bus pay back its battery carbon on our grid, versus diesel?
Landfill, waste-to-energy, or recycle — per tonne, with the avoided-burden credit?
Concrete, steel, or mass timber for the frame — embodied carbon now versus operational over 60 years?
Beef, chicken, or tofu per kg — for carbon, land, and water at once?
Three steps to your first assessment.
Pick an industry, start from a typical setup
Choose your sector and region. Begin from a pre-built archetype — a conventional plant, a generation mix, a beverage container — instead of a blank page. Smart defaults and typical ranges on every input.
Change the numbers that matter
Override any driver — fuel economy, recycled content, grid region, design flow. The engine re-sizes the inventory and recomputes TRACI + IPCC impacts, land, and water on the spot. No modeling, no formulas to write.
Read it, compare it, share it
Plain-English hotspots and benchmark checks tell you what drives the result and whether it looks right. Lay alternatives side by side, then export a multi-sheet Excel or a clean PDF report anyone can read.
214 templates, ready to run
See the full libraryEasy, but not a toy.
Eight impact categories, every template cited, every factor version-pinned for reproducibility. Nothing here is a black box — the methodology page lays out the standard and the source for each sector, and the numbers are yours to interrogate.
Read the methodologyQuestions, answered.
What does it cost?
Nothing. No credit card, no per-seat fees. The core tool is free and stays free — it runs entirely on free, redistributable public data, so there are no license costs to pass on.
Do I need to know LCA to use it?
No — that is the whole point. You start from a vetted, pre-built template instead of a blank model, every input ships with a sensible default and a typical range, and results come with plain-English hotspots and benchmark checks. If you can fill in a form, you can run an assessment — and the full methodology is there for when you want to go deeper.
Who is this for?
Anyone weighing one option against another where environmental impact now matters as much as anything else — city utility staff and consulting engineers, sustainability and procurement teams, students and researchers. No LCA background required.
How accurate are the numbers?
Template defaults are typical-value estimates from the cited sources (EPA, NREL, GREET, WARM, IPCC, RICS/LETI, Poore & Nemecek), and every pack is held to a published literature band in our test suite — a wrong factor fails our build. Real systems vary, which is exactly why every driver is editable and a sensitivity view tells you which inputs move the result.
Why not SimaPro or openLCA?
Those are excellent for exhaustive, ISO-reviewed studies — and they require LCA expertise, paid licenses (SimaPro/ecoinvent), and weeks of work. FreeLCA trades that comprehensiveness for speed-to-decision: a credible comparative LCA in an hour, on free public data. Use it to choose; use them to certify.
Does it work outside the US?
Carbon footprints do, today. We seed electricity grid factors for the US (eGRID subregions) and ~28 international regions, and GWP is method-independent — so an EV or building computes on the local grid anywhere we recognize the location. Full EF 3.1 / ReCiPe characterization for the non-carbon categories outside the US is the next data ingest.
Will my results change when new data is published?
No. Each project pins a snapshot of every emission and characterization factor at the moment you create it. You opt in to a reference-data upgrade and see the delta — your past numbers stay reproducible.
Run your first assessment in five minutes.
Free, no credit card, no setup, and no LCA degree required.
Create your free account