FOOTPRINTCALC - Free life cycle and carbon footprint calculator

FOOTPRINTCALC is a free excel tool that helps you measure and improve the environmental impact of your products! This life cycle assessment screening tool allows you to easily calculate the carbon footprint and eco-costs of products to make data-driven sustainability decisions.




Before you start

FOOTPRINTCALC provides a quick and efficient way to perform a carbon footprint / life cycle assessment. However, a basic understanding of life cycle assessment is required for understanding what data needs to be input and how the results must be interpreted. An introduction to performing an LCA can be found on the website of Sustainability Impact Metrics, the author of the database included in FOOTPRINTCALC. An alternative is studying the freely accesible guidance provided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol product standard.

Sustainability claims are increasingly coming under scrutiny. FOOTPRINTCALC is a great tool for performing hotspot analyses and LCA screenings for internal use. If you want to communicate your results to external stakeholders an independent review of the results, assumptions, and calculations can be required by different normative frameworks such as the GHG protocol or the ISO 14040 family.
FootprintCalc's detailed results

Features

Includes database

FOOTPRINTCALC includes the open access Idemat 2023 database developed at Delft University of Technology. The database contains impact factors for around 900 materials, 80 production processes, electricity country mixes, transport, and over 200 end-of-life treatments. The database also allows for calculating eco-costs, a measure to express the costs of preventing eco-burdens. Additional open access environmental databases can be found at FOOTPRINTDATA.org
A carbon footprint calculated with FootprintCalc

User friendly interface

FootprintCalc's interface
By using drop-down menu's you can easily select impact factors to calculate environmental impact. If an impact factor cannot be found in the database you can include your own custom impact factors.

Detailed results

The results of the calculations are displayed per life cycle stage and include detailed breakdowns of eco-costs. Furthermore, FOOTPRINTCALC also shows you the top 5 processes that contribute the most to the environmental impact of your product, allowing for a quick hot-spot analysis.
FootprintCalc's detailed results

Design scenarios

FootprintCalc's detailed results
FOOTPRINTCALC has a dedicated module for calculating design scenarios. This allows you to readily ascertain what the reduction potential is of design scenarios such as using recycled materials, changing production methods, or adopting circular business models.

Tutorial

Below you can find a video tutorial for FOOTPRINTCALC. The video explains how to model a product in the calculator, as well as how to use the design scenario module (starting at 15:00). The video is hosted on Vimeo and does not track and/or use cookies.

Download

FOOTPRINTCALC only works in Excel 365. The online and mobile versions of Excel 365 can be used for free. FOOTPRINTCALC is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0). Use of FOOTPRINTCALC is subject to the End User Licence Agreement.

Support

FOOTPRINTCALC is developed by The Footprinters and provided for free and open access in line with our mission to contribute to the availability of open source sustainability data. We are a two-person sustainability consultancy located in The Netherlands. If you are interested in using FootprintCalc in your organisation but need some help getting started we have developed an in-house training. Please get in contact with us via contact@thefootprinters.nl to discuss possibilities and pricing.

Version history

Version 1.0 (April 2023). First version released.