For more than 10 years Blonk has been closely involved in the EU Environmental Footprint (PEF) initiative. Currently, we’re part of a consortium (together with PRé sustainability, Carbon Minds, TCO2 Co Ltd and National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) that is working on the Environmental Footprint 4.0 (EF 4.0) life cycle inventory datasets. These datasets contain official secondary data and are designed to support EF-compliant calculations according to the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) and Organizational Environmental Footprint Category Rules (OEFCRs). 
Together with the other consortium partners Blonk will provide various EF-compliant core datasets on energy, transport, packaging, end of life, metals and minerals, chemicals, food/feed products and bio-based materials.

Recently, Blonk has published EF 3.1 datasets on feed, agrofood and  biobased materials.   

The EF 4.0 project contains a total of at least 3.200 secondary datasets. Blonk is responsible for the collection and creation of 953 datasets related to Food & Feed and bio-based materials. Furthermore, the EF 4.0 datasets, unlike the earlier developed EF-compliant datasets, will likely become publicly available (to be expected in 2026). Currently the datasets are freely available for the companies if you are conducting PEF or OEF studies as defined in the PEFCRs and OEFSRs, after 2026 the datasets are expected to be freely available for all companies.

SMEs will benefit from EF 4.0

Until today EF-compliant datasets have been developed under the lead of the European Commission, but the use is limited to official pilots and projects that are part of the EF Pilot and Transition phase.  Now that more and more policies are or will be relying on or referring to the EF methods, it is important that high-quality secondary datasets become more widely available This is especially relevant for SME’s for whom performing EF-compliant LCA studies might otherwise be too much of a financial burden.

Furthermore, making core background datasets publicly available will ensure that environmental performance comparisons between similar products in the value chain use the same background datasets. Otherwise, the variability in performance might be caused by those background datasets instead of company- or supplier-specific data, reducing the comparability of claims.

The IP of the EF 4.0 datasets will be acquired by the European Commission. This will lead to benefits for companies:

• For companies who want to start with PEF, this probably leads to cost reductions.
• More harmonization opportunities and more enforcing power by the European Commission.

Publication of the EF 3.1 datasets

Blonk has comprehensive data for food, feed and biobased materials and has been providing data on such products to the EF system already in the EF Pilot and Transition phases.

Recently, Blonk has provided 753 EF 3.1 datasets on feed (in 5 different formats), 226 datasets on agrofood and 216 on biobased materials. The 5 feed dataset formats are: unit process-single operation, system process, LCI result, foreground elementary flows and life cycle models (extended ILCD = eILCD). The life cycle models are a recent addition to the ILCD format, making it upgraded to the eILCD format. The EF 3.1 Feed datastock is one of the few data stocks already available in the eILCD format. Other data stocks will be upgraded to eILCD format in the coming year. With an eILCD format the data is much more technically connected, allowing more options for use.
The existing datasets (EF 2.0) were updated and additional datasets were created, in close cooperation with industry partners, such as European industry associations, to fill in any data gaps. In the development of EF-compliant datasets, Blonk relies on its extensive Agri-footprint database, a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database focused on the agri-food sector.