Buy the Okala Design Guide. Thousands of product design executives, practitioners, educators, and students already own this groundbreaking course guide. Download an excerpt and your copies here.
Autodesk and Sustainable Minds are empowering companies to make more sustainable design decisions. With Inventor software for Digital Prototyping, Autodesk is helping take designers and engineers beyond 3D to address the most challenging environmental issues.
Okala 2009 Impact Assessment Methodology
The science behind our software. Okala is the first life cycle assessment methodology for evaluating potential ecological and human health impacts from products used in North America. The science and data is from trusted sources including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute for Standards and Technology.
Okala 2009, a next generation dataset
Okala 2009 includes more than 550 impact factors from across all product life cycle stages: materials, processes, use stage consumables, transportation and end of life.
Continuously updated Okala impact factors allow design teams to perform what-if comparisons based on 10 impact categories, or just global warming impacts, measured in CO2 equivalents.
-
Ecological damage: global warming/carbon emissions, acid rain, eco-toxicity, ozone depletion, water eutrophication
-
Human health damage: photochemical smog, human respiratory, human toxicity, and human carcinogens
-
Resource depletion: fossil fuel depletion
Okala uses TRACI1 impact categories developed by the U.S. EPA, North American normalization and weighting values developed by the EPA2 and NIST3 respectively, and process inventory data from the most credible sources worldwide.
We are continuously adding new impact factors. Let us know what you need by using the 'Feedback' link provided throughout the assessment process.
1 Tool for reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other Environmental Impacts
For more information, visit the Learning Center.
2 United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2006
3 National Institute for Standards and Technology, 2006
Okala 2009 was based originally on the Okala 2007 impact factors from the Okala curriculum guide. The guide was developed under the auspices of IDSA, through financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Design for the Environment Program, Eastman Chemical Company and the Whirlpool Corporation.
What makes Okala 2009 'next generation'?
-
Okala 2009 was released with almost 300 more impact factors than 2007.
-
Okala 2009 impact factors have been created with updated TRACI characterization values. In some cases, impact factors have been updated with new process inventory data from a different database. The most significant new release was Eco-Invent v2.0, from a data supplier in Switzerland.
-
Okala 2009 normalization has been adjusted to be consistent with the published methodology. The 2007 impact factors were inconsistent with the published methodology. The 2009 impact factors have been adjusted to be accurate.
Because of this, it is not possible to compare assessment results done with Okala 2007 and Okala 2009 impact factors.
