Test of US federal life cycle inventory data interoperability

Life cycle assessment practitioners must gather data from a variety of sources. For modeling activities in the US, practitioners may wish to use life cycle inventory data from public databases and libraries provided by US government entities. An exercise was conducted to test if a practitioner could gather and use data from existing US federal sources together to build a life cycle assessment model in standard software. As a result, issues were identified that US federal agencies need to overcome in order to provide functionally interoperable life cycle inventory data to the public. These same challenges apply more broadly to using life cycle inventory data from different sources.