Over the past years Blonk has been closely involved in the EU Environmental Footprint (PEF) initiative. Currently, we’re part of a consortium (together with ecoinvent and PRé sustainability) that provides Environmental Footprint 3.0 (EF 3.0) 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 datasets for several sectors such as plastics, renewable materials, agro-food, textiles, chemicals. Blonk is mainly responsible for the datasets concerning renewable materials and agri-food processes. The complete EF3.0 datasets are expected to be released before the end of 2022 and will be available through the European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment.

The consortium is working together with other experts in the creation, management, and provision of the datasets. We are responsible for the collection and creation of the datasets related to renewable materials and agri-food. The existing datasets (EF 2.0) will be updated and additional datasets will be created. In this process primary industry data is preferably used and, if required, modelling and estimates will be used. This means there is close cooperation with industry partners, such as European industry associations, to fill in any data gaps. Furthermore, Blonk will rely on the Agri-footprint database and methodology, a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database focused on the agri-food sector. Besides that, the latest data on energy, transport, packaging, and end-of-life will be included in the final datasets. This data was previously developed by Sphera. Blonk was also key in the development of the EF 2.0 database, mainly through the provision of agri-food and feed data.

Challenges in data development

To fill the databases with accurate agri-food and renewables data, Blonk combined inputs from an enormous number of industry organizations and sources. It is a complicated process in terms of the size, complexity, and stage of the datasets and the number of organizations involved.
Blonk is responsible for managing around 550 datasets (in a project with about 1,500 datasets) and manages contact with multiple subcontractors and associations. The data sometimes had to be built from scratch and, in some instances, there were definition issues that needed to be solved (for example, defining consistent and clear naming). To make the process easier Blonk created templates to gather the data in a consistent format, although further alignment and refinement was necessary. APS-footprint, Agri-footprint, ecoinvent, World Food Database and primary industry data were some of the main sources used.

Dairy datasets

The dairy datasets were specifically developed in cooperation with the European Dairy Association. This approach was recently highlighted by the European Commission, and might be applied to future dataset developments for other sectors. In this process a group of dairy experts per country were asked to review the developed datasets, resulting in higher quality datasets and increased ownership by the sector.