Footwear Impact Calculator
The Footwear Impact Calculator supports brands, retailers, designers, and sustainability managers of footwear in calculating the environmental impacts of their products. This easy-to-use and low-cost web tool is created by Eurofins BLC and powered by SimaPro. It helps you estimate and analyze the environmental impact of footwear from cradle to grave by applying life cycle assessment principles.
Why choose the Footwear Impact Calculator?
Easy to use
The Footwear Impact Calculator requires no prior LCA knowledge to compute the impact of the footwear supply chain, including raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, retail, and end-of-life. Within minutes, the impact of your products is presented in detail via three impact categories: carbon footprint, water use and land use. Impact reports are instantly generated and include an easy-to-understand star rating of your footwear – indicating its sustainability performance.
Reliable, transparent and comprehensive
The calculator is built on knowledge from LCA and footwear experts. Using the SimaPro API, the user interface links to a comprehensive LCA model in SimaPro. The model covers all stages of the footwear supply chain and adopts the technical rules described in the draft Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules. The calculator relies on user input, industry expertise, as well as generic data sources such as the renowned ecoinvent database.
Cost-effective
The Footwear Impact Calculator requires significantly less time and resources to do an environmental screening of a product (or an entire product range) than a traditional LCA study. This allows you to identify environmental hotspots in footwear designs before taking action and planning performance improvements. The tool offers you the benefits of LCA, a comprehensive fact-based approach to environmental impacting, without significant cost and resource investment.
How it works
1. Navigate to blcleathertech.com and purchase credits. With one credit, you can perform one impact calculation.
2. Click on ‘new calculation’ and fill in your product details from the provided shoe templates or use the custom shoe option to define your own design.
3. Choose your shoe, components, and materials. Different levels of customization are possible.
4. Add details about distribution, retail, packaging and use.
5. Click ‘calculate’ and see the environmental impact results in a report on your screen or in downloadable form in seconds.
6. Find the environmental hotspots of your footwear product and focus on lowering your footprint!
Learn more about the modeling and technical approaches behind the tool in the methodology documentation.
About Eurofins
The Footwear Impact Calculator was created by Eurofins BLC in partnership with PRé and powered by SimaPro. Eurofins BLC is the leading leather testing and technology center for over 100 years. Eurofins BLC is dedicated to leather, footwear, chemicals, and leather product testing and provides expertise on leather and synthetic material supply chains for the footwear sector. Various companies from within the footwear industry supported the tool’s development by testing and providing feedback.