Product environmental footprint—breakthrough or breakdown for policy implementation of life cycle assessment?

Abstract

Did you hear about the latest footprint? It is not anymore about carbon footprinting (Finkbeiner 2009) or water footprinting (Kounina et al. 2013; Berger and Finkbeiner 2010); we now have to deal with environmental footprints. The EU Commission published the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF) methods (EU 2013a) as part of the Communication “Building the Single Market for Green Products” (EU 2013b). According to the documents released, the PEF and OEF methodologies build on existing life cycle assessment (LCA)-based methods and aim at harmonizing them. They purportedly aim at increasing comparability between products by predefining requirements for certain methodological aspects, thus decreasing the flexibility provided by ISO 14044 (2006). PEF and OEF were developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). But is PEF really the breakthrough for policy implementation of LCA? Close analysis of the PEF method reveals key concerns from the perspective of state-ofthe-art LCA practice and science. Rather than proposing a harmonized compromise of existing standards, it presents an entirely new one which is even in conflict with the existing ISO 14044 (2006). As such, PEF does not contribute to harmonization, but rather to confusion, proliferation, and mistrust. 1 Do we really need another footprint?