Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a holistic scientific approach to evaluate the potential environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product, service, or process throughout its lifespan, from raw material extraction to end-of-life and everything in between. By considering the comprehensive view of a product’s environmental footprint, LCA helps to identify opportunities and trade-offs to improve sustainability and ecodesign throughout the product life cycle.

Yes, Vaayu’s pioneering AI-powered approach puts science-backed data from across the supply and value chain into the hands of retailers globally. AI is used as part of many functions and software at Vaayu that ensure our partners can do things faster and more accurately. It is used in database and impact modeling calculations, helps fill data gaps, provides an Accuracy Score alongside every calculation, and ensures data flows in real-time. Vaayu firmly believes that AI and technology are crucial in lowering the industry’s impact long-term.

Yes, Vaayu is one of the few climate tech providers using prospective LCA to calculate likely future outcomes, and our Scenarios feature is an easy-to-use tool within your dashboard. Use it to compare different carbon and wider environmental impact reduction measures across supply and value chains to help inform business decisions. By modeling and understanding the impact changes of new and existing products, adding new distribution centers, changing delivery providers, lowering return or bounce rates, or changing suppliers can impact carbon emissions, partners are more accurately comparing sustainability measures against climate targets. Because Vaayu works with business-level data, Vaayu automates the impact of these measures specific to each business, meaning no two companies will ever showcase the same reduction potential.

Vaayu’s environmental impact SaaS platform is sold on an annual or monthly subscription. The AI-powered solutions can be chosen based on singular needs, packaged up to comprise multiple complementary modules (for example, partners focused on creating lower impact products often choose the Product, Supply Chain and Circular Impact Solutions, complemented by the Digital Product Passport Solution), or the Enterprise Impact Solution which offers larger companies access to every Vaayu software. By offering a flexible, modular and tailored solution, Vaayu ensures that its partners benefit from the impact assessment tooling and features they need for their profile and size. In addition to the technology, Vaayu’s partners also benefit from customer support supplied by a trained team.

Vaayu has created the industry’s largest LCA database comprising over 600,000 data points, derived from quality primary data collected via Vaayu’s retail partners and the most robust and reliable third-party sources, such as IPCC, Ecoinvent, US EPA, IEA, and DEFRA. Included data is assessed and categorized by Vaayu based on standard quality criteria such as geographical coverage, temporal relevance, technological coverage, completeness, and methodological quality, such that the most relevant and reliable data points can be automatically selected when computing a product footprint. Vaayu's in-house LCA team assesses and performs quality assurance on results.

Vaayu developed predictive AI that uses proxy inferencing to accurately bridge data gaps, providing a fuller picture of even Scope 3 and enabling brands and retailers to clearly understand their emissions and focus their efforts on the greatest reduction opportunities. Kria, Vaayu’s proprietary modeling engine and database, generates over 50,000 data points for every product calculated to create a digital twin that mirrors the complexity of the supply chain in real life. The engine then deploys machine learning algorithms and predictive AI to fill data gaps for a granular footprint, and provides an Accuracy Score per calculation enabling a better understanding of the data.

Vaayu offers footprint analysis spanning 16 environmental impact categories (as endorsed by the EU PEF for Apparel and Footwear method), allowing multiple teams across one company to harness these insights tailored to their unique objectives. Vaayu is driving impact reduction efforts going beyond carbon to also calculate impacts including water and waste across the impact categories of climate change, ozone depletion, human toxicity, particulate matter, ionizing radiation, photochemical ozone formation, acidification, eutrophication, ecotoxicity, land use, water use, resource use.

The Vaayu Platform can easily integrate with data exports (e.g. Excel, CSV) and technologies commonly used by the retail industry, from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and eCommerce systems, reducing the workload of manual data entry and ensuring the automation of impact calculations in real-time.

Vaayu is providing world-first advances and setting industry standards with first-to-market features including scenario modeling and target, including Net Zero & Science Based Targets/SBTis tracking, as well as unique circularity features and quantification methodologies.