Land use is considered to play a very important role regarding the life cycle impacts of many products or product groups. During the last ten years, several approaches to address the problem of integrating land use into the LCA framework have been proposed, nonetheless as yet no commonly accepted method has been agreed upon.

An applicable approach to incorporate land use indicators into the GaBi 4 LCA software system has been developed by LBP-GaBi (University of Stuttgart) together with PE INTERNATIONAL. Land use can now be addressed for all relevant land-intensive processes, for example, for mining processes. In the first edition, Life Cycle Inventory data concerning erosion resistance, mechanical filtration, physical and chemical filtration, groundwater regeneration rate, net primary biomass production and hemeroby are calculated for the transformation and occupation phase of land use. These values are then aggregated to form environmental indicators representative for the whole life cycle of a product.

The new land use databases will be delivered free of charge to all current GaBi users and will be an integral part of the standard GaBi package for new users. More information to come...watch this space!