JRC Ispra site Environmental Footprint (OEF): Application of the Commission Recommendation 2013/179/EU and of the OEFSR Guidance v.6.3- Reporting year 2015 -

This report represents the summary of a work carried out over the last few years involving different Units of the Joint Research Centre and a team of external consultants and reviewers. The OEF method (Organisation Environmental Footprint), together with the PEF method (Product Environmental Footprint), was developed by the JRC Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Team (now in the Land Resources Unit, D3). Both methods were published in annex to the Commission Recommendation 2013/179/EU of 9 April 2013 on the use of common methods to measure and communicate the life cycle environmental performance of products and organisations. The JRC Ispra is the 3rd largest site of the European Commission. The site is a combination of scientific activities and a broad set of supporting operations, ranging from power generation to water supply and wastewater treatment up to nuclear decommissioning. The site applies EMAS (the EU Environmental Management and Audit Scheme) to continuously improve its environmental performance and communicate it to the public. The application of the OEF, started in 2012 and reiterated over time, was a natural process and turned out to be quite beneficial for both tools. EMAS, in fact, has been getting complementary life cycle based information from the OEF while the latter has been gaining hands-on experience from EMAS in view of testing and possibly improving its methodological foundations. The JRC is therefore a unique field of play, a sort of “living-lab” where research and administration cooperate in a “win-win” perspective. This third version of the OEF study was submitted to an external review panel of distinguished experts in the domain of environmental footprinting. We are happy to present the report to the external public and hope to encourage other organisations to follow our path towards sustainability.JRC.D.3-Land Resource