Economics.
What is EaaA
EaaA (Everything as an Activity) is an attributional LCA framework — what that means, and the ideas it rests on.
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 it is versioned as v2.0 of the LCA line. 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 seven rules it rests on
Everything distinctive about EaaA follows from seven founding rules the framework calls its absolutes. They sit above every other rule, and an implementation that breaks one is wrong however convenient it is.
| Absolute | 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. |
| An activity has no functional unit | Nothing is declared "per kilogram" of anything. What an activity produces is its output flows, each with its own resource, unit and value; a consumer draws a share of the output it wants. With no reference output, there is nothing to allocate against. |
| Nothing is free text | Every resource, unit, geography and sphere a flow names is a record in a governed vocabulary with an independent authority behind it. A name is a label; the link is the identity. A label that cannot be linked is an open question, never a string in the model. |
| Every reference is versioned and pinned | A resource, a method and a factor carry the version of the authority that published them; a flow pins the version it means; a link pins the producer it joins. A result is reproducible because nothing it read can change underneath it. |
| EaaA asserts nothing of its own | Every record says where it came from and carries the source's own identifier. Where the framework must hold a list no authority publishes, it publishes that list itself, under review, and never under a data provider's name. |
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 input carries a confidence score from three components (source, geography, temporal), combined into a score from 0 to 100 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 score. 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.