BONSAI

How do we know if a product is "sustainable"? How do we assess the consequences of a change in production or consumption? How does the Solar Impulse Foundation quantifies the environmental benefits of its sustainable solutions? Information is crucial to secure correct and effective decisions. BONSAI is a global network of industrial ecologists developing an e-infrastructure to perform reliable and unbiased sustainability assessment of products – “product footprints” – freely available to support products' comparison and decisions making. Decision makers perform product footprint through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a scientific framework for systematically assessing environmental, social and economic impacts associated with a product, during its whole life-cycle. Currently, this robust framework lacks verifiable and unbiased open data, key for transparent and comparable results. The BONSAI virtual research environment is a developing open access database with the ambition to link industry 4.0 data through the semantic web. BONSAI intends to become the default open-data source for product foot-printing and a key partner of the Solar Impulse Foundation.