There are two drivers for organisations to conduct environmental assessment exercises of their products and of their organisations.
1.-TRANSPARENCY
Transparency, in turn, can be driven by:
- Legal requirements, such as the Energy Transition and Climate Change legislation both of the Spanish State and of the Basque Country – or corporate reporting standards.
- Market requirements, associated with decarbonisation processes from a value chain approach – or green procurement processes.
- By the organisation's mere conviction that transparency and environmental assessment is part of the path towards sustainability.
2.-ENVIRONMENTAL IMPROVEMENT
Measuring is the first step to work on environmental improvement. Environmental assessment with an organisation focus is a means to provide an overall picture, identify possible improvements and monitor the progress towards meeting environmental goals. By applying the assessment to a product or service approach, design decisions aimed at reducing the environmental impact of the product or service from its conception can be made; in other words, ecodesing.
Ihobe is making the CLIMATE & CIRCULARITY CALCULATOR tool available to companies in order to facilitate that environmental assessment and to address both drivers. It is a free computer tool for a simplified assessment of the environmental performance of organisations, products and services from a life-cycle approach. Thus, the tool allows the carbon footprint of the organisation, products and services, and the corporate environmental footprint to be calculated; a simplified life-cycle assessment of products and services to be performed; and circular economy indicators to be calculated from an organisation approach; all in accordance with recognised standards.
Thus, from the organisation approach, the tool can be used to calculate the corporate environmental footprint, as per the methodology published by Ihobe, the carbon footprint as per UNE-EN ISO 14064-1:2018, and a selection of circular economy indicators following the “Circular Transition Indicators 3.0” methodology, compatible with the future ISO 59020 standard.
From a product approach, the tool is used to perform the life-cycle assessment of products and services (in line with ISO 14040 and ISO 14044), along with calculating the carbon footprint as per ISO 14067:2018.
The fact that the tool is simplified means that it has a limited database that cannot be customised to the characteristics of the organisation and its environmental aspects. In other words, it provides an order of magnitude of the environmental impacts, but it would not be applicable to an exhaustive life-cycle assessment as per the EN ISO 14040 / EN ISO 14044 standards, or to produce product environmental declarations as per the EN ISO 14025 standard.
This tool is an improved and extended version of the earlier ECO-it tool that Ihobe made available to companies over 15 years ago, and of the carbon footprint tool for organisations.
This new tool includes over 150 standard materials and processes in industrial companies, itemised in 25 environmental impact categories, with an additional focus on the climate change category, which are described in the following section. As the result of its work with the companies, Ihobe will continue to add materials and processes to the database, along with updating it as required.
The tool draws on the knowledge generated by Ihobe from its work with companies to study the organisation and product metrics in an integrated way. With a common entry information base, the tool is therefore able to calculate different metrics, either for the organisation or for the product.
Training and resources for using the tool
To ensure that organisations make the most of the tool, Ihobe makes available:
- Complete user manual for the tool, which serves as a practical guide for its use.
- Online self-learning course, which explains the theoretical and practical basis of environmental metrics and the step-by-step use of the tool.
To access the course:
- Access the following link
- Log in / Register as a user on egela.basquecircularhub
- Enrol in the course
- Start and learn at your own pace
These resources allow any company, regardless of its size or previous experience, to measure, interpret and improve its environmental performance in a simple way.
How to use the tool
Organization video 
Product video
Access to the Climate & Circularity Calculator tool
If you have access credentials and have already accepted the terms of service, log in using the following link. Otherwise, you will be required to log in or register, in addition to accepting the terms of service.
