Ecobilan provides services, tools and data to carry out environmental benchmarks.

Important global databases with inter-company benchmarking possibilities can positively impact company environmental performance far beyond the strict product LCA concept.

As Ecobilan did for IISI and several other organisations, Ecobilan provides the organisations willing to make environmental benchmarking with its expertise in Life Cycle Assessment methodologies and processes, and also with the necessary means and tools as software and environmental database to put them into practice.

An example of inter-company world-wide benchmarking:
The IISI project

The International Iron and Steel Institute (IISI) decided in 1997 to carry out Life Cycle Inventories (LCI) of the products manufactured by IISI members. The objective was to respond to their customer's needs. The material production phase of durable products can represent a significant contribution to the LCI. For instance in the case of the automotive sector, since steel is major constituent of all vehicles, the IISI global effort to make an LCI was a key breakthrough for the global automotive industry.

By analysing the LCI results presented as global (world), regional (e.g.:Europe) average, min. and max. values for each flow, one of the companies found out that for one kind of emissions, they were above the average and close to the maximum range value, whereas for most others they were rather on the low emission side.

A detailed process analysis revealed that they had one process step that caused most of the emissions. The company decided to improve this process step by means of an investment.