There is a lack of standardized country-specific environmental data to combine with nutritional and dietary data for assessing the environmental impact of individual diets in epidemiology surveys, which are consequently reliant on environmental food datasets based on values retrieved from a heterogeneous literature. The aim of this study was to compare and assess the relative strengths and limits of a database of food greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) values estimated with a hybrid method combining input/output and LCA approaches, with a dataset of GHGE values retrieved from the literature. France is the geographical perimeter considered in this study, but the methodology could be applied to other countries. The GHGE of 402 foodstuffs, representative of French diet, were estimated using the hybrid method. In parallel, the GHGE of individual foods were collected from existing literature. Median per-food-category GHGE values from the hybrid method and the reviewed literature were found to correlate strongly (Spearman correlation was 0.83), showing similar rankings of food categories. Median values were significantly different for only 5 (out of 29) food categories, including the ruminant meats category for which the hybrid method gave lower estimates than those from existing literature. Analysis also revealed that literature values came from heterogeneous studies that were not always sourced and that were conducted under different LCA modeling hypotheses. In contrast, the hybrid method helps build reliably-sourced, representative national standards for product-based datasets. We anticipate this hybrid method to be a starting point for better environmental impact assessments of diets.

For a growing number of firms, it is important that life-cycle assessments (LCAs) as well as the interpretation of the results obtained be carried out directly by the design teams. Unfortunately, the complexity of these two elements hinders the development of really eco-designed products. In this paper, we propose a generic approach allowing a company to develop a specific environmental assessment tool which enables designers to carry out simplified environmental assessments during the design process. To be more precise, the generic approach is based on the creation of two main features: impact functions to simplify the inherent complexity of LCAs and an environmental categorisation per product range to facilitate the use of environmental assessment results by the design team. This paper presents the development of such tool (named EcoT) in the context of automotive part suppliers and demonstrates its technical robustness on two case studies (dashboards and door panels). At the end of the paper, we discuss the usability and appropriability of the EcoT tool based on handling tests carried out by the company design team.