In many ways! Firstly, not all data needs to be shared when sharing the results of an LCA. You only strictly need to share the data with the individual conducting the LCA, and the critical reviewer(s), and these are usually protected through a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Secondly, it is common to have parts of the model being critical, and others less so (or not at all). For example, a company can have "secret recipes" for a number of things, but not be too concerned about sharing other data such as how much electricity they consume. With an Earthster business license, you can control what gets shared, with whom, and how much. You could choose to share your model up to a certain depth, or share the model, but hide the recipes in another model that is completely restricted. Or share it only with the few individuals that you trust. The choice and the control is yours, really!

When it comes to assumptions, one should check their impact through what's called a Sensitivity Analysis: seeing the effect if those assumptions were to be different. If changing the assumptions dramatically change the conclussions, we should be very weary of those conclusions. That's why at Earthster we make sensitivity analysis as easy as changing a few numbers, and you immediately see the effects.

This is at the core of why we started Earthster. We've come accross many companies that want others to share their data (and call that "a problem to get primary data"), and then are reluctant to share their own data because it includes trade secrets. Our solution is controlled sharing: you can decide what to share (from full model to just impacts) and with whom (specific customers, all your customers, or the public). And of course, connected data: you will be sharing LCAs instead of PDFs. All this combined is the solution to the problem of primary data availability.

Important indeed! The ISO14040 and ISO14044 standards, released in the 1990s, define how a Life Cycle Assessment should be done.

Scientific peer reviews require a number of other scientists to have approved the scientific validity of the paper, so they can be even more demanding than a critical review. In addition, journal articles will typically go through more scrutiny from a methodological point of view. Of course, both types of reviews have risks of excessive complacency, so at Earthster we advocate for review and validations of the actual models in all cases.