Payback time on Ecoinvent

Question

I would like to use ecoinvent for work but the license and maintenance fee are quite high. From my research, it is clearly the most widely used database, but I am not sure my bosses will agree. From LCA practitioners, how fast do you think the payback time is on one commercial license? I am not sure how often I would use it since our work volume can vary a lot.

Answer 1

Hello Kaunis,

I did a similar exercise for EcoInvent, SimaPro, GaBi, etc. The payback time was significantly shorter for EcoInvent in OpenLCA, for the volume and size of tasks for our office.

That being said, depending on the projects you have, perhaps you can rely on free databases such as the EF?