Scope-of-use disclaimer

FreeLCA is a planning-grade Life Cycle Assessment tool. It is built to help water and wastewater professionals compare alternatives during facility planning — not to produce results suitable for regulatory submittal without qualified review.

What this tool is for

Comparative analysis of facility-planning alternatives (e.g., conventional activated sludge vs. membrane bioreactor) on environmental impact alongside cost.
Early-stage hotspot identification — where in your project most of the impact comes from, so you can focus engineering effort.
Sensitivity testing — how results move when you change a driver (design flow, electricity intensity, chemical dose).
Stakeholder communication — turning LCA numbers into charts that make it into facility-plan documents.

What this tool is NOT

Not a regulatory submittal tool. Results have not been third-party reviewed per ISO 14044 §6.1. If your work product will be submitted to a regulator, lender, or court, a qualified LCA practitioner must review the model, the assumptions, and the reference data before submission.
Not a substitute for site-specific data. Process templates ship with defaults derived from EPA, AWWA, WEF, EPRI, Water Research Foundation, and peer-reviewed literature. Your facility may differ — review every driver before relying on the result.
Not a full-supply-chain LCA. v1 uses public per-unit emission factors (eGRID, EPA Emission Factors Hub, USLCI). It does not perform a matrix inversion against ecoinvent or other commercial inventory databases.
Not a cost estimator. CAPEX/OPEX inputs are reported back as entered; they are not validated against construction cost indices.

Reference data and provenance

Every project pins a reference data version (eGRID year, TRACI method version, IPCC report). Pinning ensures reproducibility — results from 2024 stay computable with 2024 factors after newer factors land. The methodology page lists the exact sources and versions in use.

Uncertainty and accuracy

LCA results have inherent uncertainty from emission factor variability, scenario boundary choices, and allocation decisions. Use the sensitivity tornado and out-of-range driver warnings as starting points; do not interpret three significant figures as three significant figures of accuracy. A reasonable rule of thumb: only differences between scenarios larger than ~20% should be considered meaningful without further analysis.

Liability

FreeLCA is provided "as is" during open beta. We make no warranty that results are fit for any specific purpose. You are responsible for verifying that the inputs, methods, and reference data match your project before acting on the outputs. Decisions made on the basis of these calculations remain the responsibility of the user and any qualified professionals retained.

Contact

Methodology questions or correction requests: hello@freelca.org

Last updated: open beta launch.