Call for testing: Canadian Agri-food Life Cycle Data Centre

The Canadian Agri-food Lifecycle Data Centre (CALDC) invites you to participate in the public testing phase of its SimpLCIty software, which is now available online at https://caldc.ca.

The Canadian Agri-food Lifecycle Data Centre is a new public domain repository for Canadian agri-food sector life cycle inventory data sets. Guided by an expert stakeholder advisory panel comprised of members spanning academic, private sector, and government bodies, the CALDC is being developed by the Food Systems Priority Research for Integrated Sustainability Management (PRISM) lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. The key features foreseen for the CALDC are:

a publicly available LCI database with a user-friendly web interface
maximally interoperable with other LCI databases and LCA software packages, including any eventual Canadian or North American LCI data repositories
data set import and export functionalities in both EcoSPOLDII and ILCD formats
transparent metadata reporting based on current best practices
periodically updated
eventually hosting LCI datasets for the majority of common agri-food supply chain activities and commodities in Canada
eventually supported by and utilized by a partnership of industry, government, and academic stakeholders

SimpLCIty is an online service designed to make it easy to build life cycle inventory datasets and submit them directly to the CALDC for public release. It allows you to create, view, edit, export, and import flows and processes in both ILCD and EcoSpold Activity formats. SimpLCIty is freely available and only requires a web browser – it can even be used on a phone.

This service is now available for public beta testing. All LCA practitioners and sustainability researchers are invited to try SimpLCIty and to submit feedback through the application, so that the developers can continue to improve and expand the application. Following the public testing phase and subsequent updates, the CALDC will begin accepting and hosting publicly available LCI data sets.