A global collaborative accounting network to calculate the resource use of products and services

To promote sustainable buying decisions there is the need to better inform consumers about the environmental burden of products. Today, environmental product assessment is mostly conducted by the producer itself or external consultants using life-cycle inventory data from databases. These assessments are time consuming and, due to inconsistent system bound- aries, scopes and time references, results are difficult to compare. Despite the progressive developments of information and communication systems, reliable, accurate, and up-to-date data for assessing the resource use of products and services is still lacking. Within the European project myEcoCost (runtime 2012 - 2015) a novel methodology will be introduced that defines a global collaborative network of resource accounting nodes. It will provide a means of accounting for and expressing usage of natural resources at the micro level for products, services and technologies to inform economic actors on environmentally relevant information with dynamically calculated, near real-time figures. Relevant and timely data is linked to the financial accounting and passed from supplier to customer recursively through the whole value chain to produce ecological costs for each product or service. Out- put of the project will be a sound and straightforward resource accounting system and ac- companying ICT and software elements to demonstrate the myEcoCost approach in a proof- of-concept prototype. This paper outlines the myEcoCost vision and presents interim results with respect to the re- source accounting methodology.