One of the products of the RSE research activities in this three-year period 2022-2024 is an R software package to compute the Commodity Life-Cycle Costing (CLCC), an economic indicator measuring natural resource consumption by products/processes during their life-cycle. R is a programming language and software environment for, among other things, statistical analysis, data visualization and text-editing, supported by several operating systems and that is fully open-source. R is becoming increasingly popular among scientists and professionals for its versatility and because it allows the fully reproducibility of results.

An R software package is an organized collection of functions to perform a very specific task that usually expands the standard capabilities of the software. Packages are a great way to organize code and to share it with others. The development of an R package to calculate the CLCC indicator is aimed at increasing the visibility of a product of RSE’s research activities and to make it easy, for external LCA and LCC practitioners, to use the indicator in their analyses.

The functions contained in the package allow to use, as input, spreadsheets generated by the popular LCA software SimaPro, to calculate a version of the indicator considering critical materials only and to run uncertainty analyses with Monte Carlo techniques.

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