23.5.2022
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
L 144/15
Environmental footprint (EF) impact category – class of resource use or environmental impact to which the life cycle inventory data are related.
Environmental footprint (EF) impact category indicator – quantifiable representation of an EF impact category.
Environmental impact – any change to the environment, whether adverse or beneficial, that wholly or partially results from an organisation’s activities, products or services.
Environmental mechanism – system of physical, chemical and biological processes for a given EF impact category linking the life cycle inventory results to EF category indicators.
Eutrophication – EF impact category related to nutrients (mainly nitrogen and phosphorus) from sewage outfalls and fertilised farmland that accelerate the growth of algae and other vegetation in water.
The degradation of organic material consumes oxygen, resulting in oxygen deficiency and, in some cases, fish death.
Eutrophication translates the quantity of substances emitted into a common measure, expressed as the oxygen required for the degradation of dead biomass.
To assess the impacts due to eutrophication, three EF impact categories are used: eutrophication, terrestrial; eutrophication, freshwater; eutrophication, marine.
External communication – communication to any interested party other than the commissioner or the practitioner of the study.
Extrapolated data – data from a given process that is used to represent a similar process for which data is not available, on the assumption that it is reasonably representative.
Flow diagram – schematic representation of the flows occurring during one or more process stages within the life cycle of the product being assessed.
Foreground elementary flows - direct elementary flows (emissions and resources) for which access to primary data (or company-specific information) is available.
Foreground processes – those processes in the product life cycle for which direct access to information is available.
For example, the producer’s site and other processes operated by the producer or its contractors (e.g. goods transport, headoffice services, etc.).
Functional unit – defines the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the function(s) and/or service(s) provided by the product being evaluated.
The functional unit definition answers the questions ‘what?’, ‘how much?’, ‘how well?’, and ‘for how long?’.
Gate to gate – a partial product supply chain that includes only the processes carried out on a product within a specific organisation or site.
Gate to grave – a partial product supply chain that includes only the distribution, storage, use, and disposal or recycling stages.
Global warming potential (GWP) – An index measuring the radiative forcing of a unit mass of a given substance accumulated over a chosen time horizon.
It is expressed in terms of a reference substance (for example, CO2-equivalent units) and specified time horizon (e.g. GWP 20, GWP 100, GWP 500 – for 20, 100 and 500 years respectively).
By combining information on both radiative forcing (the energy flux caused by emission of the substance) and on the time it remains in the atmosphere, GWP gives a measure of a substance’s capacity to influence the global average surface-air temperature and therefore subsequently influence various climate parameters and their effects, such as storm frequency and intensity, rainfall intensity and frequency of flooding, etc.
Horizontal averaging – the action of aggregating multiple unit process datasets or aggregated process datasets in which each provides the same reference flow, to create a new process dataset.
Human toxicity – cancer – EF impact category that accounts for adverse health effects on human beings caused by the intake of toxic substances through inhalation of air, food/water ingestion, penetration through the skin – insofar as they are related to cancer.