Open IO Canada

The model:

Open IO-Canada is a Canadian environmentally extended input-output (IO) model (also known as IO-LCA model). It is based on Canadian economic input-output tables from the year 2009, which document what the different Canadian industries produce and purchase from one another, and augmented with environmental data from various sources. It was initiated by the CIRAIG with funding from the Québec Ministère du Développement durable, Environnement et Lutte contre les changements climatiques as part of the Quebec Life Cycle Inventory Database Project.

It can provide insights into the potential life cycle impacts of the production and consumption of commodities in Canada, taking into account the entire supply chain of purchased commodities, throughout the Canadian economy.

As such, it is similar to a Life Cycle Inventory database (such as the Quebec LCI database), except that products are specified in terms of generic commodities and industry output and quantified in Canadian dollars rather than in physical units.

The online tool:

A free online implementation of the Open IO-Canada model is found here. One can use the tool to:

• calculate cradle-to-gate impacts of generic commodities or industry outputs;
• create models that represent one’s production facility or a specific product; and
• conduct different types of contribution analysis for hot-spot assessment.

It is possible to export results to Excel. Online visualisation tools are under development.