EaaA (Everything as an Activity) is an attributional LCA framework.
That one sentence carries three claims. Unpacking them is the fastest way to understand what the platform does.
- An LCA framework — EaaA is a way of doing Life Cycle Assessment: quantifying the environmental cost of a product or process across its whole life cycle. It keeps LCA's goal and its core machinery — elementary flows to environmental compartments, characterisation factors, impact categories — and provides its own structured model, vocabulary, and rules for working within them. It is a framework in the same sense ISO 14040 offers one: a scaffolding you model inside.
- Attributional — it describes what is declared to happen. It does not model what a decision would displace or what would happen otherwise; those consequential questions are answered by building two declared models and comparing them, on top of the framework rather than inside it.
- Everything as an Activity — its founding commitment: anything created, produced, grown, mined, refined, or transported is an activity, and the model is activities all the way down until it touches nature.
Where it sits relative to LCA
EaaA is not a replacement for LCA and not a separate discipline — it is a framework within LCA. The relationship is roughly:
Scrum is to Agile what EaaA is to LCA — a concrete, opinionated framework within a broader discipline.
The fit is actually a little tighter than that analogy suggests. EaaA doesn't reinvent LCA's four ISO phases (goal & scope, inventory, impact assessment, interpretation) — it re-expresses them, one-to-one, and is designed to produce numbers comparable to conventional LCA when the same boundary and characterisation factors are used. What it changes are opinionated choices within LCA's degrees of freedom: the data model, the treatment of missing data, and how uncertainty is represented.
See Classical LCA vs EaaA for the full term-by-term and phase-by-phase mapping.
A new framework
EaaA is new — a deliberate second-generation reframing of classical LCA, which is why its working name is LCA2. It is a draft framework: not an ISO standard or an established, peer-reviewed method, and developed in the open.
The plan is explicit — prove it, then set it free. EaaA is validated the honest way: by implementing it fully and reproducing the results of established datasets (for example, published Exiobase / ExioML figures) with the same framework that computes everything else. This platform is that implementation and its first proving ground. Once proven, the framework will be published for independent review and established in its own right, independent of Economics. — a standard the company uses, not one it owns.
The three ideas it rests on
Everything distinctive about EaaA follows from three founding principles.
| Principle | What it means |
|---|---|
| Everything is an activity | Anything produced resolves to the activity that produced it — never a terminal, opaque endpoint. A produced input always carries its full upstream chain, so its cradle-to-gate burden can't quietly vanish. |
| No cut-offs | The model never truncates a chain to manufacture a tidy number. Where data is missing or generic, that shows up as a low accuracy score, not a silent omission. A low score is an honest output, not a failure. |
| Money is a resource | A monetary amount is just another flow — a money flow denominated in a currency unit — scored on the same gradient as carbon or water. This makes "environmental cost as visible as monetary price" structural rather than rhetorical. |
The model in one breath
- Activity — a process (industrial or natural). Where environmental burden lives.
- Flow — a directed edge: an input or output of a resource, at a value, in a unit.
- Sphere — where a flow terminates: a physical layer of the Earth (geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere) for emissions and draws from nature, or the Technosphere for flows between activities.
- Resource — the what of a flow (CO₂, electricity, wheat, money). A label for matching, never the end of a chain.
- Accuracy — every flow carries a confidence score from three components (source, geography, temporal), rolled into a grade from A to F that propagates up the chain.
The whole model is these five ideas and how they connect. See Core concepts for worked examples, and the Glossary for precise definitions.
Why it's built this way
Classical LCA buys its apparent precision partly by stopping — truncating chains at convenient boundaries and treating background datasets as exact. EaaA refuses that trade. It never hides ignorance; it represents it, as a visible, improvable accuracy grade. The result is a model that tells you not just what a number is, but exactly how much to trust it and where the trust runs thin — honest by construction, and designed to get better as the data behind it improves.
Next: Classical LCA vs EaaA · Core concepts · Accuracy & confidence.