Welcome to ECOCLASS

ECOlogical and CLimatic ASsessment of product systemS
v. 0.3


In brief...

ECOCLASS is a software to assess the environmental impact of vehicles used in urban transport. You can compare various vehicle combinations e.g. on the way to your workplace, or investigate how emissions change when you drive a diesel-powered car instead of car running on petrol. You can also check out what happens when you change your driving style or the number of people traveling with you.

If you're in a hurry or just want to refresh your memory there is a Quick Guide. More detailed information on how to use ECOCLASS can be found in the menu on the left.

Detailed Product Overview

Basically, ECOCLASS is a graphical front end to do life cycle analyses (LCA) of products. One of the main features of ECOCLASS compared to other LCA tools is the possibility to change the parameters that describe product utilization interactively, instead of being urged to build a completely new process. Available utilization processes are currently limited to urban transport vehicles, but can be easily extended to nearly anything (given enough resources...).

The LCA in ECOCLASS reports three emission categories (greenhouse gases, acidification potential, and tropospheric ozone precursors), which can be visualized in two different types of graphics... Results can be printed (via a web browser) and saved for further processing.

ECOCLASS is based on the public domain database of GEMIS 4.2 (Global Model of Emissions of Integrated Systems), developed by Öko-Institut e.V.. GEMIS is not a specialized database for transport systems, rather it contains thousands of processes from various economic sectors. Of course, this limits the exactness of the data generated by ECOCLASS, but offers the advantage to drop the limitation to transport systems in the future, without having to refer to other databases.

From this it becomes clear that ECOCLASS is no more than an aid and a rough approximation to reality. The generated results rely on many and often simplifying assumptions. They should be used only as a first point of orientation and starting point for discussions.