Materials & Packaging Materials & Packaging

Free First-of-Its-Kind App Enables Total Impact Modeling of Products, Supply Chains

Makersite, a groundbreaking open data platform created by Everycs that aims to make better products faster, has developed a first-of-its-kind modeling app that simultaneously calculates a product’s production costs, its compliance and its effect on environment and health.

By Sustainable Brands | Published 6 years ago | About a 2 minute read

Makersite, a groundbreaking open data platform created by Everycs that aims to make better products faster, has developed a first-of-its-kind modeling app that simultaneously calculates a product’s production costs, its compliance and its effect on environment and health. The free app promotes continuous product optimization and allows designers to create products that are both cost-effective and sustainable.

Designers and developers can control upwards of 80 percent of a product’s impact on the environment, health, costs and regulatory compliance. Makersite’s Dynamic Performance Modeling application facilitates this process by allowing designers to reduce a product’s impact right from the start by making the effect of all materials and production processes transparent. The results are displayed at a glance and near real-time, with parameters updated accordingly as changes at the design or production level are implemented.

The app also shows a preview of how products can be improved with a suggestion engine for alternative materials, suppliers and processes. The system immediately quantifies possible improvements across all performance attributes, such as the effects on compliance, costs and environment.

This is made possible by the data aggregated on Makersite. Leading life cycle assessment (LCA) and other databases were combined with analytic tools and made available for usage in the cloud. As a result, companies can use the data they need without having to buy complete databases. They can perform the analysis directly through Makersite via free apps or connect data streams via API interfaces into their own systems.

“Makersite dramatically simplifies access to supply chain information. We can now understand and transparently share data with colleagues, partners and customers alike. No need for multiple databases or supercomputers for calculation. The support is great and the costs are affordable for small and medium-sized companies,” said Maik Birnbach, Fairstainability Manager at Einhorn Products GmbH.

Makersite’s environmental impact, cost and risk database contains millions of data points from more than 20 national and international databases. A total of 80 million chemical substances including their properties; 9,000 product regulations; 70,000 materials; 36,000 industrial processes; 600,000 environmental impacts; and 5,000 product models are currently available. One of them is, for example, Ecoinvent with more than 13,000 industrial processes and around 20 environmental indicators each. The data is constantly updated to reflect new regulations or product variants.