The Product Environmental Footprint – A Critical Review

The product environmental footprint (PEF) is one of two life cycle assessment methods from the European Commission. With their published recommendation on environmental footprint methods, the European Commission provides a framework to assess the PEF for every product in a company. Since there is a high probability that the PEF will be mandatory for companies shortly, it is crucial that this recommendation guides companies and mainly technical employees through all phases of the PEF and enables them to execute a PEF study correctly. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the process of calculating a PEF for a product critically. A PEF study is conducted on a smart luminaire with the software program OpenLCA. The use case concludes that many aspects of the PEF still need to be clarified. Especially the calculation methods behind every impact category need to be more transparent. Further, a comparison of the use case with a provided tutorial from OpenLCA is made. The comparison shows that no information is available on how to model the end-of-life and the use stages, which are mandatory in a PEF study. (c) 2023 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V.