ERG Co-writes Article Exploring Chemical-Manufacturing Life Cycle Inventories

ERG’s Sarah Cashman co-wrote a recently published Environmental Science & Technology article exploring how data mining can be used to create reliable life cycle inventories (LCIs). The article, “Mining Available Data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to Support Rapid Life Cycle Inventory Modeling of Chemical Manufacturing,” uses a case study to demonstrate a new method for extracting publicly available information housed in EPA’s databases to create chemical-manufacturing LCIs. By adopting this method, future researchers may be able to employ a standard, transparent, and automated approach to compile openly available data with flexibility to incorporate new data sources as needed for use in life cycle assessment. Sarah worked with staff from EPA’s National Risk Management Research Laboratory to develop the method.