The TRACI 2.1 impact categories are available for users with a full Ecoinvent license.

TRACI 2.1 (the Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other environmental Impacts) is an environmental impact assessment method developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

It provides characterization factors for Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA), industrial ecology, and sustainability metrics. Characterization factors quantify the potential impacts that inputs and releases have on specific impact categories in common equivalence units. Impact categories include:

List of the TRACI 2.1 impact categories and corresponding units.

Follow these instructions to learn how to view other impact categories.

Up to this point, Earthster followed the LCA Commons interpretation of the TRACI 2.1 method, which does not include characterization factors for emissions to subterranean water. TRACI does not specify how these emissions should be treated, and groundwater pathways are generally less well studied than surface water.

Because of this methodological gap, results for toxicity categories in Earthster were typically order-of-magnitude lower than in other systems (e.g. ecoinvent) that apply impact factors to subterranean emissions.

To improve consistency and ensure a more complete representation of groundwater emissions, Earthster now extends TRACI to include subterranean water contexts. This brings TRACI in line with how other impact methods, such as ReCiPe and EF, treat similar emissions.

TRACI2.1 becomes available