1 Introduction

Austria is a landlocked European country with a total area of 84,000 m2 of mostly mountainous terrain. The country has an open economy consisting mainly of small- and medium-sized enterprises with exports of goods and services accounting for 47% of the gross domestic product (GDP) (Nations Encyclopedia 2018). However, the most important industry in the country is tourism (Österreich Werbung Vienna 2016). Austria produces about 65.3 billion kWh of energy, of which up to 79% is supplied by renewable energy sources (International Energy Agency 2016), indicating that the country has a strong environmental consciousness.

The primary aim of this study was to determine the availability of life cycle-related studies in Austria. The study focused on life cycle assessments (LCA), carbon, and water footprinting studies in particular that are available to the public and non-specialists, as well as LCA practitioners. To satisfy this need, emphasis was placed on data that was both freely available as well as in restricted, paid for academic databases. Additionally, the number of GRI reports was investigated to determine the general environmental reporting practices of industrial players as a pseudo-comparison with what is expected to be an academic outcome of the prior searches.

2 Methods

Online searches were conducted using a similar method as found in (Maepa et al. 2017; Bodunrin et al. 2018; Burman et al. 2018; Croft et al. 2018; Engelbrecht et al. 2018). Google/Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, and Scopus were used to find documents published between 2000 and 2016. Non-exclusive searches using the keywords “life cycle assessment,” “LCA,” “carbon footprint,” “water footprint,” and “Austria” were used in order to find articles, reports, and conference papers that contained these keywords. Additionally, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) database reports for Austria (2016 only) were included to get a sense of the reporting tendencies of companies.

It is possible that some studies have been overlooked during the search method used here; however, the aim of the review is to assess the availability of easily accessible material to everyday users who would generally employ the above keyword searches and would not be knowledgeable about individual researchers in the country. German language reports were not included in the results and only reports written in English were considered. In addition, other life cycle management studies, e.g., social life cycle assessment and organizational life cycle assessment were excluded as explicit key words.

3 Results

The analysis conducted located 15 life cycle assessment-related studies pertaining to Austria (Table 1). The documents covered a wide range of topics. Material production and energy-related studies each comprised four reports and building construction studies yielded an additional three reports. The remainder of the reports is related to battery recycling, wastewater treatment, and the food industry.

Table 1 Summary of LCA-related results for Austria
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In terms of carbon footprint studies, only six reports were found (Table 2). Four of these studies were for the food industry. Four of the six studies were accessible without paid subscriptions. For the water footprinting studies (Table 3), three studies focused on the agriculture and dairy industries while one study was a general countrywide report.

Table 2 Summary of carbon footprint reports for Austria
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Table 3 Summary of water footprint reports for Austria
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The GRI database search yielded 77 reports from organizations within Austria for 2016 (Table 4). The search included reports for all reporting criteria of GRI-3, GRI-3.1, GRI-4, non-GRI, and GRI-cited reports. Of all the reports, 46 reports (60%) were GRI-4 reports, 22 reports (29%) were non-GRI, and nine reports (12%) were GRI-cited reports.

Table 4 GRI database search results
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4 Discussion

Since Austria has a strong industrial background, it was expected that more consideration would be given to power generation and material production. LCA reports on these two sectors accounted for 53.3% (~ 27% each) of the total LCA studies documented within this review. Additionally, construction accounted for 20%, recycling and wastewater treatment 13.3% (~ 7% each) and the food industry the remaining 13.3% (Fig. 1a). Of the studies found, 11 (73%) were obtained via paid channels while the remaining four (27%) were freely accessed through online searches (Fig. 1b). Conversely, 67% of the carbon footprinting studies was freely accessible, while 50% of the water footprinting studies was also freely available. Hence, much of the work on LCAs that pertain to Austria is not easily accessible to the public via free channels.

Fig. 1
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a Relative proportion of LCA-related studies for various sectors. b Proportion of paid access studies to free access studies

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Of the 77 listed GRI entries, the financial services sector was the largest contributor with 12 entries (16%). The constructions and construction materials industries provided eight entries (11%), followed by the energy and energy utilities industries that comprised seven entries (9%). These are the largest contributors to the GRI database, however, combined, they contribute just over a third of the total number of entries, illustrating that there are contributions from a number of diverse industries.

The reports found in this study were all published after 2007; an unexpected result, given that the 12th SETAC Europe Annual meeting was held in Vienna in 2002 and that LCA was highlighted as an important aspect of the meeting (Rebitzer et al. 2002). Some studies before 2007 could be found, for example (Jungmeier et al. 2002; Jungmeier et al. 2003; Unger et al. 2004), but required a modified search method or stricter search restrictions by date, both options of which were outside the scope of this work. Additionally, these studies were not for Austria only or were written by Austrian authors about non-location specific topics. The authors also noted a possible problem with older work, in that PDF documents are less likely to be internally searchable, further limiting a search engine’s ability to find appropriate results.

Comparing these findings to a search within the ecoinvent v3.4 database, the authors were able to find 350 datasets. While this number is a total of allocation and consequential datasets, for unit and system processes, cutoff by allocation and point of substitution, even if the total is conservatively divided by six, this gives approximately 87 datasets. This value is higher than the 15 studies found through online searches. Additionally, the authors noted over 18,000 reports were listed for Austria in the openLCA Nexus (https://nexus.openlca.org). However, only 8286 were freely available and it appeared if many were published in German so not applicable to the aim of this paper.

5 Conclusions

The scope of this review was to evaluate life cycle assessment-related data as they pertain to Austria. It was found that a large number of LCA-related documents were only obtainable by way of paid means, with a few being freely accessible through online searches. Austria’s major exports are within machinery, metallurgical products and textiles and this was reflected in the proportion of LCA studies focused on them, especially with the energy consumption in their production processes.

Using the method as presented here, it is noted that a large number of studies were not available by typical searches as would be performed by non-specialists, e.g., Google and that the majority (over 99.5%) were seemingly hidden in either ecoinvent or the openLCA Nexus.