Data and licence
The factor database
| Database | Life Cycle Inventory database of the Swiss Federal Administration, BAFU:2026, version 1 |
| Publisher | Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN / BAFU), Division Economics and Innovation, Section Consumption and Products, Bern |
| Obtained | 2026-07-27, from openLCA Nexus, as the openLCA database BAFU-2026 v1 (also delivered in ecoSpold v1) |
| System model | Attributional, cut-off at end-of-waste. Not stated in the documentation shipped with the download (Context and Content; Terms of Use, 23.06.2026); inferred from the Swiss federal LCI rules v8.1 §9.3, which BAFU datasets follow (no recycling credits, economic or physical allocation, boundary at the end-of-waste point), and from the ecoinvent v2.2 lineage ecobau states for them. The catalogue row says both the convention and that BAFU itself is silent |
| Builds on | Not documented in the same documentation |
| Data quality | Datasets follow the guideline BAFU DQRv2:2023; most were critically reviewed for ISO 14040 compatibility (per Context and Content) |
| Extent | Roughly 11,000 inventories in 176 categories (2025 edition, per BAFU). This application's catalogue carries 7,551 of them — 6,630 materials and products and 922 disposal and treatment processes for the disposal pickers (821 since 2.5.0, 101 more since 2.9.2) — selected as described in tools/factor-extraction/catalog-categories.md |
| Citation | Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN). Life Cycle Inventory database of the Swiss Federal Administration, BAFU:2026, version 1 [dataset]. Bern: FOEN; 2026. Downloaded from openLCA Nexus, 2026-07-27. |
| Required quotation | The Terms of Use (§2.3) require: "Life Cycle Inventory database of the Swiss Federal Administration, BAFU:2026". German form: "Datenbank der Schweizer Bundesverwaltung, BAFU:2026, Bundesamt für Umwelt". |
| Licence | Data may be used and reused, including in a calculator, but not sold or redistributed as a database. Reports shipped with the data are the authors' copyright. |
How a factor is computed and frozen
Impact figures are not taken from BAFU's pre-aggregated results. Each process a
clinician actually uses is solved once with openLCA's own engine against the
full database — a matrix roughly the size of the database — and the single
figure per impact category is stored in material_impact
(tools/factor-extraction/README.md).
| LCA software | openLCA 2.6.1 (olca-core, MKL solver), driven headless |
| Impact methods | EF 3.1 — openLCA's EF 3.1 Method (adapted), 25 categories; IPCC 2021 at two horizons, GWP 100 and GWP 20 (AR6 characterisation factors as shipped in openLCA's method pack) |
| Extraction runs | 2026-08-14 (EF 3.1 climate categories; IPCC 2021, both horizons), 2026-08-31 (EF 3.1, all 25 categories, superseding the first) and 2026-09-29 (the waste-management datasets, both methods). Each factor row carries the date of the run that produced it |
| Geography | Per dataset, as the BAFU process name states it — CH, RER, GLO, BE, ENTSO-E … — stored on the material and on every frozen report line |
A published report is frozen: its lines are copied into report_line with
the factor value, method, category, dataset name and UUID, catalogue edition,
geography and extraction date they were computed with. Loading a newer factor
edition supersedes rather than overwrites (is_current), so a figure quoted in
a paper stays reproducible after the catalogue moves on. Nothing published is
ever recomputed; a version found to be wrong is withdrawn, with its reason, and
its lines stay as the record.
Factors from the literature
Medications carry their own emission factor and a free-text reference in
drug.source_primary, written in Vancouver notation, with an optional URL. The
reference appears on every report line for that medication, in the PDF and in
both Excel sheets. A medication marked as a proxy says what it stands in for
and why.
Licence of the software
Copyright (c) 2026 Hannes Dendoncker and Jack Van Overschelde. All rights reserved. This software, its source code, and its accompanying documentation are the property of the copyright holders named above. No licence is granted, expressly or by implication, to any other party. No permission is given to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, or sell this software or any portion of it, whether in source or compiled form, without the prior written consent of all copyright holders. Access to this repository, whether granted directly or through a hosting provider, does not constitute a licence. THIRD-PARTY DATA This software is designed to be used together with life cycle inventory data published by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (BAFU). That data is published by BAFU under its own terms of use and is not covered by this notice. Nothing here grants any right in that data. Where such data or figures derived from it are distributed with or displayed by this software, they remain subject to BAFU's terms and are attributed to BAFU at the point of use. NO WARRANTY This software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. In no event shall the copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages, or other liability arising from, out of, or in connection with the software or its use. This software produces environmental impact estimates. It is not a certified life cycle assessment tool and its output is not a substitute for professional assessment.