[cmutel]

The method to calculate there fact sheets (or environmental footprints) is called life cycle assessment, and has been trying to come up with labels for a long time. There have been large projects by Walmart and Tesco, for example, to label all their products. The problem is data availability.

This is an area where the Hacker News community can help. There is an initiative to replace the closed-source databases used to calculate such labels called BONSAI: https://bonsai.uno/; https://github.com/BONSAMURAIS/bonsai (I am one of the volunteers). We are doing the best we can, but could really benefit from people with expertise in

* Semantic web/RDF (to design and populate the larger database)

* Text processing (to use the web as a source of data on production and consumption)

* Machine learning/remote sensing (to understand the spatial pattern of industry)

There is also an active community focused on energy data and modelling: https://openmod-initiative.org/