Pickler’s Fast-Track LCA makes it easy to calculate the environmental impact of your packaging. You start by adding your own product data, link it to verified IDEMAT datasets, and refine results over time as more supplier data becomes available.
Step 1: Add Your Primary Data
You can start your calculations in three ways:
Form – fill in product data directly in Pickler’s interface
Spreadsheet – import data in bulk for multiple SKUs at once
API – connect your ERP or database for automated data transfer
Whatever way you choose, it always starts with your primary data; product-specfic data that comes directly from your business or suppliers.
Minimum primary data (required)
Material composition and weight (e.g. 85 g paper, 15 g LDPE)
Additional primary data (optional)
Energy use and energy mix during processing
Pallet configuration
Transport type and distance
End-of-life treatment
Additional packaging used for distribution
Pickler’s data model is highly granular and allows you to include as much information as you have available. In practice, most companies don’t have all data yet — and that’s completely fine.
What if you don’t have all primary data?
Pickler can fill data gaps with conservative, verified defaults. This lets you calculate impact immediately and replace defaults later with your own primary data as it becomes available.
Step 2: Map Your Data to the IDEMAT Database
Once your primary data is added, the next step is to map it to secondary data. Secondary data is data that — unlike primary data — is not directly measured by you or your suppliers, but comes from a database such as IDEMAT.
IDEMAT is an ISO-compliant database containing environmental data for thousands of materials, manufacturing processes, country and regional energy mixes, and transport types.
To complete your calculations, you will map your primary data to the most appropriate records in IDEMAT.
For example: if your bill of materials contains 600 g kraftliner and 400 g testliner, you simply map these to the closest matching sources in IDEMAT. IDEMAT provides datasets that represent the impact of producing 1 kg of kraftliner and testliner, based on peer-reviewed research included transparently in Pickler.
Instead of doing your own research to determine the impact of producing 1 kg of testliner (which isn’t feasible or scalable), you can rely on IDEMAT’s validated data.
After mapping, Pickler automatically calculates the impact of your 400 g of testliner and 600 g of kraftliner using the IDEMAT records you selected.
You repeat this for other lifecycle steps as well, such as processing locations. IDEMAT provides the energy mix for production locations worldwide, electricity use for common processing and conversion methods, and end-of-life data per region to reflect local recycling or disposal routes.
IDEMAT is the most transparent, complete, and regularly updated database available. Read here why we prefer IDEMAT over other databases, such as Ecoinvent.
Step 3: Improve Your Data Quality
Once your initial calculation is complete, Pickler helps you continuously improve your results by reporting on the data quality of every product.
In LCA, data quality reflects how specific and reliable your inputs are.
The more primary data you add (from your own operations or suppliers), the more accurate and product-specific your results become.
Secondary data keeps calculations scientifically robust when supplier data is unavailable.
Default values ensure results remain conservative and transparent in the meantime.
Data quality tracking helps you see where to improve, prioritize supplier data, and build credibility with more trustworthy, verifiable results. Over time, replacing defaults with primary inputs gives you the clearest picture of your packaging’s true environmental impact.
In short
Calculating your footprint in Pickler comes down to a few clear steps:
Enter your available primary data
Optionally fill gaps with defaults
Map your data to secondary data in IDEMAT
Improve accuracy over time with suppliers
End with traceable, regulation-ready results