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Often, a Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) can be useful to judge the ecological and social impact of a product or procedure.
What tools to produce an LCA are freely available?
Especially of interest would be tools with a shallow learning curve, that allow a casual user (who doesn't write LCAs every day) to asses a product quickly.
One if the issues with LCA is that it's very data intensive, and that generic products/processes can be subject to a lot of uncertainty. These factors merit a need for time investment to generate the data, standardize it, and develop tools for using it. That's why the products are expensive, often have high learning curves, and why people take multiple semester course sequences to learn about LCA.
That being said, some of the raw data is free - the US LCI database is, and can be combined with LCIA tools like ReCiPe in Excel to get 'interpretable' impacts like GHG emissions. That won't fulfill the 'easy' part right away, but some Python or Excel macros would likely make it pretty functional for everyday use.
An alternative might be something like Sustainable Minds, which is not free, but is designed to be very easy to use. It's aimed at designers and iteration, so it might not be ideal.
One sidenote is that assessing the social impacts of products/processes is something that's still very much in basic research.
TL;DR: There's a reason LCA tools cost money, and it's because it requires a lot of time and effort to generate the underlying data. You can either deal with a free but limited subset of the data and invest time, or invest money, perhaps in a simpler tool.
Please consider using an economic input-output model. Alternative (other-than-process-based) methods of calculating net product impact can provide quick, cost effective, and yet comprehensive life-cycle assessments. A free economic input-output LCA is available via the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon.
Some background:
LCA can currently be performed 2 ways: 1) Process-based or 2) economic input-output based.
Process-based LCA [O]ne needs to identify the inputs, such as pulp, water, and dyes to make the paper, the trees and machinery to make the pulp, and the forestry practices to grow and harvest the trees. Similarly, one needs to include inputs and outputs for packaging the cup for shipment to the store, the trip to the store to purchase the cups, and that result from throwing the cup in the trash and eventually being landfilled or incinerated. Even for a very simple product, this process-based LCA method can quickly spiral into an overwhelming number of inputs and outputs to include. Now, imagine doing this same process-based LCA for a product such as an automobile that has over 20,000 individual parts, or a process such as electricity generation.
Advantages: detailed, process specific; allows for product specific comparison Disadvantages: time-intensive; system boundary is subjective; proprietary
An internet search brings several reputable vendors, but as mentioned, these processes are usually very thorough and rather expensive.
Economic Input-Output: Inputs to the automobile manufacturing industry sector include the outputs from the industry sectors that produce sheet metal, plate glass windshields, tires, carpeting, as well as computers (for designing the cars), electricity (to operate the facilities), etc. In turn, the sheet metal, plate glass windshield tire, etc. industry sectors require inputs for their operations that are outputs of other sectors, and so on. Each of these requirements for goods or services between industry sectors is identified in an EIO model.
Advantages: results are economy-wide, comprehensive assessments; allows for systems-level comparisons; uses public data; reproducible; generally quicker
Disadvantages: product assessments contain aggregate data; process assessments are difficult; must link monetary values with physical units
It's important to note that many of the data sets here are US, but the site also provides links to Canadian, German, and French data.
FYI: Economic Input-Output LCA models are founded on Wassily Leontief's Nobel Prize winning theory.
The most basic, free tool to create an LCA would simply be a spreadsheet like OpenOffice Calc. However, dedicated LCA software does make things easier for you, but most software is not free. The few good and free LCA software packages I know are:
There are however quite a number of free tools that focus specifically on a particular impact or use case. Some examples are:
The most popular commercial software packages for a full process-based LCA are without a doubt SimaPro and GaBi. They are not free, but
You mentioned that you are looking for software preferably for "the casual user". Conducting a full process-based LCA however, is not for the casual user no matter which tool you are using. To draw up such an LCA you need to know about things like reference flows, unit processes, cut-off rules, allocation, impact assessment, ISO 14040 guidelines and other LCA conventions. If you don't have at least a basic understanding your LCA will be worthless. To learn about these LCA concepts, I can recommend:
following the free online course How Green Is That Product? An Introduction to Life Cycle Environmental Assessment which will teach you all the basic concepts. The course is given once a year. The home work assignments use spreadsheets to learn how to perform an LCA.
reading the free e-book "LCA Quantitative Approaches for Decisions That Matter" written by Matthews et al. specifically aimed at (under)graduate students.
More resources can be found in this site's LCA tag wiki
Various places with free LCA info/DBs seem to exist, but among them at least one I'm aware is large-scale and with a lot of free elements - plus relatively convenient:
OpenLCA is a Software combining many free and non-free LCA databases. It might be the offer the most comprehensive bundling of free and non-free database (tbc).
OpenLCA Nexus is its corresponding online tool for convenient Dataset search -> you'll see which free and non-free dataset it contains.
Just create a free account, and search online, or download the tool which is quickly installed and simple to use.
I would like to add GaBi to the list. It is a fully suited life cycle assessment program and therefore quite complex. It is free for students (up to Master level) and phd students in non-OECD countries.
http://www.gabi-software.com/international/software/gabi-education/
If it's for buildings and you are a student, One Click LCA is another option: it allows full Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing calculations that are compliant with ISO standards and access to the biggest LCA database of construction materials on the market. You can read more here: www.oneclicklca.com and request a student license here. As a disclaimer, this is the company I work for.
