FAQ

Who is this for?

Planners, engineers, and analysts choosing between alternatives — in any of the seven sectors FreeLCA covers: water & wastewater, energy, transportation, waste, packaging, buildings, and food & agriculture. The workflow is built around the everyday question “which option should we choose, and what does it cost the planet versus the budget?”

Is this really an ISO 14040/14044 LCA?

Yes — within the limitations of a foreground model. Goal and scope are explicit in the project + scenario setup. Inventory is the elementary-flow ledger on each scenario. LCIA uses EPA TRACI 2.1 + IPCC AR6 characterization factors, plus Land Use and Water Consumption indicators. Interpretation is supported by hotspot tables, contribution charts, a sensitivity tornado, and side-by-side comparison.

Why not ecoinvent / GaBi / SimaPro?

Those are excellent tools, but they require LCA expertise, paid licenses, and weeks of work per study. FreeLCA trades that comprehensiveness for speed-to-decision: a meaningful comparative LCA in an hour, on free public data. Use it to choose; if you need cradle-to-cradle, full-supply-chain rigor for a publication, use openLCA + ecoinvent on top of our results.

How accurate are the numbers?

Template defaults come from recognized public sources for each sector — EPA, NREL, Argonne GREET, EPA WARM, ICE / RICS / LETI, IPCC, and peer-reviewed literature (for example Poore & Nemecek for food) — and every template is held to a published literature band by our test suite. They are typical values; real systems vary, often ±50%, with design and operation. The whole point of the wizard is to let you customize the drivers to your case, and the sensitivity tornado tells you which ones actually move the result.

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 Global Warming is method-independent — so an EV, a building, or any electricity-driven result 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; until then those categories use TRACI 2.1.

What about PFAS?

In the water sector we have a PFAS ion-exchange template and a GAC template configurable for PFAS treatment. PFAS toxicity characterization factors are still evolving — for now we model the operational + embodied impacts, but the downstream human-health toxicity number remains an active area of LCA methodology.

Can I export to openLCA / SimaPro?

Not yet. Excel and PDF export are supported today, both carrying the full methodology and citations. ILCD / JSON-LD export to openLCA is on the roadmap.

Will my data be safe?

Multi-tenant Postgres with row-level security gates everything to your organization. We don't share or sell your data. Reference data tables (TRACI, eGRID, IPCC, and the other factor sets) are global public reads. See our privacy policy.

What does it cost?

Nothing. The core tool is free and stays free — it runs on free, redistributable public data, so there are no per-seat license fees to pass on. No credit card, and no paywall on running or exporting an assessment.