The IDEA Japanese Inventory database is widely used in Japan for LCA. A subset of the database was used to determine emission factors of the National Carbon Footprint Trial Project. IDEA is a hybrid database that contains LCI datasets of non-manufacturing sectors (agriculture, forestry and fisheries, mining, construction and civil engineering) as well as manufacturing sectors (food and beverage, textile, chemical industry, ceramics and building materials, metal and machinery) and also sectors such as electricity, gas, water, sewerage, waste treatment and recycling. The database covers all products manufactured in Japan and many Japanese services, meaning that you will usually have at least some secondary dataset to link to when using IDEA as the background LCI database for Japan. Datasets are categorised in a hierarchical structure (IDEA category and SimaPro category), and each process name contains a unique IDEA code to make search easier. The newly added land use and water flows are based on surveys and statistics which represent Japan.
About the developer
The IDEA database is developed and maintained by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and the Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry (JEMAI). The implementation to SimaPro was done by TCO2 Co. Ltd.