Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a key source of information on environmental impacts of products, services or systems. The Commission proposed the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) as a common way of measuring environmental performance. The PEF methodology, grounded on the LCA standard methodology, allows manufacturers and consumers to obtain reliable and comparable information about the performance of products with respect to various environmental impact categories. A calculation based on the general PEF methods gives quantitative information on the impacts of products, taking into consideration the entire value chain.

R&I activities in the proposal should:

• review existing knowledge on LCA/PEF, identify and fill knowledge gaps and then develop and test PEF category rules for selected product groups of policy and market relevance;
• assess the added value and cost-benefit of these rules compared to other methods or criteria;
• perform in-depth full life cycle assessment studies (also addressing end-of-life aspects) based on PEF for those products groups to identify, quantify, interpret and communicate environmental impacts;
• develop appropriate datasets tailored to the assessed product groups identifying and filling data gaps, as much as possible based on industry and other representative data, and create tools which will be made publicly available to enable and ease PEF-compliant assessments and communications among stakeholders, as well as their verification;
• develop and apply approaches and methods to derive and support potential ecodesign requirements from PEF-compliant assessments, i.e. how decisions for design with a lower environmental footprint can be motivated, and further assess their socio-economic impacts;
• develop and apply approaches and methods: a) to identify and check sustainability requirements used or proposed in legislation, labels and standards relevant for the products in study; b) to analyse how to enhance consistency, synergies and harmonisation between such requirements and ecodesign requirements;
• develop guidance, training and dissemination strategies and material to support the wider use of PEF in the selected sector(s).

Proposals should focus on at least one of the following product groups: home/interior textiles; final products made of metals, or plastics; detergents; lubricants, paints and varnishes; polymers; selected groups of other chemicals; ICT products.