FreeLCA
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Documentation

Everything you need to run your first assessment in FreeLCA — across any of the seven industries — and to understand exactly how the numbers are produced.

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What FreeLCA is

A free tool for fast, defensible comparative life cycle assessment. You pick an industry and a region, start from a literature-sourced template, customize the drivers to your case, and get environmental impact reported beside lifecycle cost — so the trade-off is one number a decision-maker can act on. It implements the ISO 14040 / 14044 framework on a foreground model: credible in an hour, not a multi-week specialist study.

The seven industries

One shared, literature-validated engine, with a template catalog and functional unit per sector:

  • Water & Wastewater — per m³ treated or delivered
  • Energy & Power — per MWh generated
  • Transportation & Fleet — per km / tonne-km / passenger-km
  • Waste & Recycling — per tonne managed, with avoided-burden credits
  • Packaging — per package, by recycled content and end-of-life
  • Buildings & Construction — per m²·yr, embodied + operational (EN 15978)
  • Food & Agriculture — per kg or per serving, with land and water

What you get

  • 214 pre-built process templates, each with a real citation and held to a published literature band by the test suite — and every driver is yours to override.
  • Eight impact categories: EPA TRACI 2.1 (Global Warming, Acidification, Eutrophication, Smog, Ozone Depletion, Particulate Matter) plus Land Use and Water Consumption inventory indicators; Global Warming uses IPCC AR6 GWP.
  • Local grid electricity: US eGRID subregions plus ~28 international grid regions (52 grids in all), so anything electric — a BEV, an all-electric building — reflects the grid it actually draws on.
  • Cost beside impact: CAPEX + OPEX, lifecycle NPV at your discount rate, and a cost-per-kg-CO₂e figure on every result.
  • Seven interactive chart types — bar, stacked bar, sunburst, treemap, Sankey, radar, and parallel coordinates — plus a sensitivity tornado, with PNG / SVG / CSV export on each.
  • Side-by-side scenario comparison and one-click Excel + PDF export, both carrying the full methodology and citations.
  • Reproducible by design: every project pins a snapshot of its emission and characterization factors at creation. Your past results never shift under you — you opt into a reference-data upgrade and see the delta.

What it costs

Nothing. FreeLCA is free, and the core tool stays free. It runs entirely on free, redistributable public data — EPA TRACI, eGRID, IPCC, NREL, Argonne GREET, EPA WARM, ICE, the Federal LCA Commons, and peer-reviewed literature — so there are no per-seat license fees to pass on to you. No credit card to start, and no paywall on running an assessment or exporting it.

Scope & disclaimers

Results are planning-grade: they inform engineering and procurement decisions and are backed by transparent, cited factors. They are not a third-party-reviewed EPD or a regulatory submittal. A qualified LCA practitioner should review the work before any public assertion or compliance use. The methodology page states the standard, data sources, and system boundary for each sector.