The “2025 critical mass sprint” led to a surge of new datasets from a wide spectrum of sources made available via the IEDC in a common data format. With the help of the Freiburg team and the CIRCOMOD EU Horizon project colleagues (https://circomod.eu/), we have collected, formatted, and uploaded more than 180 new datasets on product material composition, energy intensity, and lifetimes of products, focussing on products and commodities including appliances, buildings, vehicles, infrastructure, industrial assets, and energy system technologies during the last year. This brings us closer to our goal of a functional and helpful data archiving and retrieval tool for the entire industrial ecology community!
As a result, the IEDC now contains (amongst many others):
- 8 million product flow datapoints from the literature
- 200k in-use stock data points
- 2700 data points on product lifetimes
- 100k+ data points on product material composition
- 65k+ datapoints on sector splits, end-use shares, or market shares
- 8000+ data points on process yield
- 5000+ data points on criticality metrics
- 25+ datasets on inequality in service, stocks, flows, and footprints (socio-metabolic inequality)
- More than 40 groups of datasets from more than a dozen projects.
To make all these data searchable, we expanded the IEDC’s search capabilities. It is now possible to
- Search for all datasets with given product, material, etc. label: https://www.database.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/itemSearch.aspx
- Search for data from individual authors or DOIs: https://www.database.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/iedc_author_DOI_search.aspx
- List all datasets that belong to a given project or group of datasets: https://www.database.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/projects.aspx
These recent updates mark the end of the 2025 critical mass sprint, and we offer the enhanced IEDC to the global community of sustainability scholars and consultants as a useful screening step and first iteration for data collection for industrial ecology and socio-metabolic research.
Background: The Industrial Ecology Data Commons (IEDC) is an entirely new type of database that contains more than 400 datasets for industrial ecology and socio-metabolic research, including stocks, flows, process inventories, process yield factors, material composition and lifetimes of products, and many more. The goals of the IEDC are to provide easy access to socio-metabolic, industrial ecology, and circular economy data to researchers and consultants and to provide researchers with an infrastructure that facilitates systematic data formatting and labelling. Data are extracted from a variety of sources, formatted into the IEDC data model, matched to the IEDC classifications, and uploaded. Launched in 2018, the IEDC is continuously improved and expanded. The IEDC is part of a larger open science effort of the industrial ecology group in Freiburg.
