|
|
|
ECOSYS: an attempt to cope with the full complexityAll our human activities and particularly all the products of our activities impact on the planet earth, its natural structures and its resources. They affect the ability of surviving for ourselves as well as for all living beings. They do this - by depleting resources - raw materials and space - by affecting the capability of land, water and air to renew itself - by polluting the natural environment as well as manmade structures in ways to make them unsuitable for human and other living organisms.
The overall assessment of the ecological effects of products and activities is extremely complex. Not only is it difficult to add up all the partial products and partial activities that occur in the pathway of their emergeance; but also it is a matter of evaluation of the positive or negative impacts of all those products and activities. Not only the production of products but also their disposal or their eventual fate is of importance. This means that life cycle assessment - LCA is necessary and models to judge the unwanted effects are mandatory
Life Cyle Analysis or in German "Oekobilanz-Systeme" are meant to collect and display burden to the environment of any products and services available. The information must cover the graddle to grave history of the burden. Many attempts have been made; but all have been suffering from three problems: - the complexity of the trees of origin - the need for continuous updating - the different types of burden valuation for different uses and locations Simplification has finally made the breakthrough. The presently often used system of "ecological footprint" is the most common and probably best accepted particularly by the press. A true system, however, can only be established by participation of a huge number of contributors (in e.g. a way as used for Wikipedia). Contributors would have to be producers, service suppliers and distributors. They all should participate in their own interest of demonstrating the acceptability or even the superiority of their products and services. A system that would allow the provision of a fully flexible collection and evaluation of extremely large volumes of data is presented below. The system has initially been conceived under the coverage of CIBA Corp., Basel. The company was interested to provide such data for its own chemical products. A protoype was developed and used to incorporate the production data of CIBA's divisions. In this way certain effects of textile chemicals were assessed. With the merger and aquisition events (> Novartis, > Ciba Specialty Chemicals > BASF ) , the system became an orphan system. MANDAPRO obtained the programs and information, but was not able to pursue further development. Detail information is given as attachments to this page. Any interested party - commercial or non-commercial - is wellcome to build on this information and can contact us for assistance and access to the software etc. - the principle - the data model - overview of the existing programs - further options for widening of the system
|
|
MANDAPRO AG, c/o P.Fankhauser, Bachlettenstr. 41, CH-4054 Basel, e-mail: info@mandapro.com Stand: 20.05.2019 |
