Ecochain

From bills of materials to product footprints

Ecochain is life cycle assessment (LCA) software for manufacturers. It measures the environmental footprint of individual products and of large product portfolios, and it is built for sustainability and product teams as well as for LCA specialists. The company says its activity-based method lets a business create many LCAs within minutes, instead of writing each report by hand.

Product, supplier and facility data

Product data is brought in from bills of materials through CSV or Excel files or through an API. The platform keeps product specifications, supplier information and facility details in one structured system. It models the production process, the product data and the supplier data, so that results reflect the real differences between products. The company says it can measure the footprint of several manufacturing sites and generate strategic environmental insights from the same information.

Hotspots, declarations and reports

The platform singles out the components responsible for most of a product's footprint, so teams can test alternative materials and components and compare designs. It generates environmental product declarations (EPDs), product carbon footprints (PCFs) and LCA background reports. The company says its declarations have been published through several programme operators, including EPD Global, NMD, MRPI, EPD International and IBU.

Expert support and a growing customer base

Ecochain combines software with specialist services. A team of environmental specialists, with doctoral-level training, helps clients set up the tools and answers their questions along the way, and the company says that team works in Dutch, English and German. It cites more than two million LCAs and more than 450 manufacturers as customers, and describes the work as growing from a few products to a whole product range.

Regulation and tenders

The company says its results are built to pass verification, which matters for tenders and for questions from regulators and customers. Because the models reflect a manufacturer's own production and supplier data, the company argues that claims about a product can be defended in detail rather than relying on generic figures.