About FreeLCA

Big decisions about what to build — a treatment plant, a power source, a fleet, a building, a package — get made on cost. Capital, operating, net present value. The environmental consequence of those same decisions almost never sits next to the dollar figures, because the tools that measure it were built for LCA specialists, cost a license, and take weeks per study.

FreeLCA puts environmental impact on the same page as cost, in the same hour, at the same level of effort. Pick an industry, start from a typical setup, and see what each alternative costs the planet right beside what it costs the budget — then customize every number for your specific case.

What it covers today

Seven sectors, on one shared, literature-validated engine:

Water & Wastewater — treatment trains, biosolids, pumping, distribution
Energy & Power — generation by technology, per MWh
Transportation & Fleet — vehicles, fuels & freight, EV-vs-ICE
Waste & Recycling — landfill, WtE, composting, recycling credits
Packaging — formats, recycled content & end-of-life
Buildings & Construction — embodied + operational carbon, EN 15978
Food & Agriculture — crops, livestock, land & water

That is 214 ready-to-run process templates, each with a real citation and held to a published literature band in our test suite. Every template is a working starting point you can override down to the last driver.

How it is built

Impact assessment: EPA TRACI 2.1 (Global Warming, Acidification, Eutrophication, Smog, Ozone Depletion, Particulate) plus IPCC AR6 GWP, and inventory indicators for Land Use and Water Consumption.
Electricity, anywhere: US eGRID subregions plus ~28 international grid regions, so a battery-electric vehicle or an all-electric building reflects the grid it actually draws on — France vs Germany vs Poland diverge as they should.
Cost alongside impact: capital, operating, lifecycle NPV, and a cost-per-kg-CO₂e figure on every result — the marginal lens a board uses to weigh dollars against carbon.
Reproducible: every project pins a snapshot of the emission and characterization factors at creation. Your results don't shift when new data is published; you opt in to upgrades and see the delta.
Cited, methods anchored: NREL LCA Harmonization (energy), Argonne GREET (transport), EPA WARM (waste), ICE / RICS / LETI (buildings), Poore & Nemecek (food), IPCC agriculture & wastewater. The methodology page lays out every source per sector.

What it's for — and what it isn't

FreeLCA is for planning-grade comparison: which alternative, and why, backed by transparent, defensible numbers you can hand to a council, a board, or a client. It trades the exhaustiveness of a full ISO-reviewed study for speed-to-decision — a credible comparative LCA in an hour instead of weeks. It is not a substitute for a third-party-verified EPD or a regulatory submittal; results should be reviewed by a qualified practitioner before any public assertion. The methodology page states the standard and scope for each sector.

What's free

All of it. FreeLCA runs entirely on free, redistributable public data (EPA TRACI, eGRID, IPCC, NREL, GREET, EPA WARM, ICE, the Federal LCA Commons, and peer-reviewed literature), so there are no per-seat license fees to pass through. No credit card, no paywall on core LCA.

Where it's going

EF 3.1 and ReCiPe characterization factors for non-carbon categories outside the US (the routing is already built in)
Deeper international grid + material data as high-quality public sources are found
Uncertainty & Monte Carlo on the sensitivity tooling; org-level custom template authoring

US data is deepest today; Europe is the priority next region. Where a high-quality local value isn't available, we use a clearly-labeled global proxy rather than quietly presenting a US factor as local.