Flamingo: Environmental Impact Factor Matching for Life Cycle Assessment with Zero-Shot Machine Learning

Abstract

Consumer products contribute to more than 75% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primarily through indirect contributions from the supply chain. Measurement of GHG emissions associated with products is a crucial step toward quantifying the impact of GHG emission abatement actions. Life cycle assessment (LCA), the scientific discipline for measuring GHG emissions, estimates the environmental impact associated with each stage of a product from raw material extraction to its disposal. Scaling LCA to millions of products is challenging as it requires extensive manual analysis by domain experts. To avoid repetitive analysis, environmental impact factors (EIF) of common materials and products are published for use by LCA experts. However, finding appropriate EIFs for even a single product under study can require hundreds of hours of manual work, especially for complex products. We present Flamingo, an algorithm that leverages natural language machine learning (ML) models to automatically identify an appropriate EIF given a text description. A key challenge in automation is that EIF databases are incomplete. Flamingo uses industry sector classification as an intermediate layer to identify when there are no good matches in the database. On a dataset of 664 products, our method achieves an EIF matching precision of 75%.