China Opens Its Industrial Secrets: TianGong Database Brings Transparency to Life Cycle Assessment

For decades, one of the biggest obstacles to understanding the true environmental cost of products made in China has been a simple lack of data. Life cycle assessment, the rigorous accounting method that traces the raw materials, energy flows, and emissions associated with everything from a smartphone to a cement plant, depends on detailed inventories of industrial processes. Yet the international databases that underpin most such studies have long relied on rough approximations, extrapolations from European or American conditions, and aggregated statistics that poorly reflect the distinctive technologies, energy mix, and supply chains of Chinese industry. A large collaborative team led by Ming Xu of Tsinghua University, together with Weiqiang Chen, Yutao Wang, Lei Shi, and dozens of coauthors across China and abroad, has now published the TianGong Database, an open-source, entry-level life cycle unit process database built specifically for China and released in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The scale of the release is striking. At its core, the database contains 2,000 unit process datasets with high spatial resolution, spanning a wide range of industry sectors. Each unit process is the fundamental building block of a life cycle inventory: a discrete industrial operation, such as producing a tonne of clinker, smelting a batch of aluminum, or generating a megawatt-hour of electricity, described in terms of its inputs of raw materials and energy and its outputs of products, emissions, and waste. By documenting these processes with detailed records of material use, energy consumption, and waste generation, TianGong gives analysts the raw ingredients from which complete product life cycles can be assembled and audited.

Beyond the unit processes, the database incorporates 157 input-output datasets and 2,277 environmental reference parameter datasets. The input-output component is particularly significant for macro-scale analysis. Input-output datasets capture the flows of goods and money between economic sectors, allowing researchers to trace environmental pressures through entire supply networks and to estimate impacts where bottom-up process data are incomplete. The environmental reference parameters provide the contextual values, such as emission factors and regional characteristics, against which specific processes can be normalized and validated. Together, these three layers form a hybrid structure that supports both fine-grained product assessments and economy-wide analyses of China’s industrial metabolism.

What distinguishes TianGong from many previous efforts is its commitment to openness, traceability, and transparency. The database follows internationally recognized methodologies and is formatted for the ILCD entry-level standard, the reference format developed under the International Reference Life Cycle Data System for exchanging life cycle inventory data. This means datasets are not merely numbers in a spreadsheet; they carry structured metadata describing their sources, system boundaries, geographic and temporal scope, and data quality. The entire database is freely accessible under the MIT license, one of the most permissive open-source licenses available, allowing researchers, companies, and policymakers to use, adapt, and redistribute the data with minimal restriction.

The problem the database addresses is well documented in the methodological literature. Studies of spatial scale effects have shown that life cycle inventory results can shift substantially depending on where and how underlying data were collected, and assessments of Chinese products built on generic global datasets can misstate impacts by wide margins. China’s industrial system has distinctive features: a coal-heavy electricity grid whose carbon intensity varies dramatically by province, process technologies that differ from those in Europe or North America, and supply chains that are often more vertically integrated than their Western counterparts. When analysts substitute foreign data for missing Chinese data, the resulting environmental footprints can be systematically biased, undermining both academic studies and the policy decisions built upon them.

The consequences of such biases are not trivial. China is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter, and its carbon neutrality pledge has turned life cycle thinking into a matter of national strategy. Accurate inventories are essential for evaluating whether electric vehicles, photovoltaic panels, batteries, and other low-carbon technologies genuinely deliver net environmental benefits when manufactured in China. They matter for carbon accounting of export goods, for green procurement standards, and for identifying which industrial sectors offer the greatest opportunities for emission reductions. Previous work by members of the team, including a detailed life cycle inventory of Chinese cement production published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, demonstrated how much insight sector-specific data can provide compared with generic substitutes.

The name of the database is itself a statement of intent. TianGong is named after the seventeenth-century encyclopedia Tian Gong Kai Wu, compiled by Song Yingxing and often translated as The Exploitation of the Works of Nature. That historical text meticulously documented the agricultural and industrial practices of its era, recording how materials were extracted, transformed, and recycled, and it is celebrated today for embodying early concepts of sustainability, ecological balance, and the cyclical use of resources. By invoking this heritage, the developers signal that the database is meant to be a modern counterpart: a systematic, open documentation of how nature’s works are exploited, this time with quantitative rigor and digital accessibility.

The project is also notable for its collaborative structure. The author list spans more than forty institutions, including Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fudan University, Nankai University, Beijing Normal University, Tongji University, and international partners at the University of Groningen, the University of Sheffield, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Adelaide. According to the contribution statements, the work was divided among teams responsible for methodological framework design, sector-specific data collection, data organization, validation, and quality checking, with Ming Xu coordinating the overall research direction and Kebin He providing guidance on the development framework. The effort was supported by the Carbon Neutrality and Energy System Transformation program at Tsinghua University and by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and it builds on the TianGong Initiative, which supplied rules, guidance, tools, and technical infrastructure.

Access is provided through dedicated platforms, and the developers emphasize community-driven contributions and continuous updates as central to the database’s future. This governance model resembles the approach of established international resources such as ecoinvent, but with a crucial difference: rather than a closed, subscription-based model, TianGong’s MIT licensing invites researchers worldwide to scrutinize, extend, and improve the datasets. Openness of this kind is not merely ideological. Transparent, traceable data allow independent verification of inventory figures, enable meta-analyses across studies, and reduce the duplication of effort that occurs when every research group quietly assembles its own proprietary estimates. For a field that has struggled with reproducibility, a large, documented, openly licensed inventory of the world’s largest industrial economy is a meaningful step forward.

The implications reach well beyond academia. Companies seeking to calculate the carbon footprints of their Chinese supply chains now have a defensible, region-specific foundation for their claims. Regulators designing carbon labeling schemes, green finance taxonomies, or product environmental declarations can ground them in data that reflect actual Chinese production conditions rather than imported assumptions. Researchers modeling decarbonization pathways for steel, cement, chemicals, and power generation can calibrate their models against real process inventories. As the database grows through community contributions and periodic updates, its developers hope it will serve as a reliable foundation for life cycle assessment in China, filling critical data gaps and supporting the resource efficiency and sustainable development goals that motivated the project. In an era when environmental claims face increasing scrutiny, the arrival of a transparent, open, and spatially resolved inventory of Chinese industry may prove to be one of the more consequential infrastructure investments in sustainability science.

Subject of Research: An open-source life cycle inventory database of Chinese industrial unit processes

Article Title: TianGong database—an open-source, ILCD entry-level life cycle unit process database of china

Article References: Xu, M., Chen, W., Wang, Y., Shi, L., Cao, Z., Chang, H., Chen, C., Ding, X., Du, J., Duan, H., Fang, K., Feng, C., Fu, C., Gao, X., Guo, J., Guo, M., He, M., Hu, Y., Huang, B., … He, K. (2026). TianGong database—an open-source, ILCD entry-level life cycle unit process database of china. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2001-2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00136-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00136-7

Keywords: life cycle assessment, TianGong database, China, open-source data, unit process, life cycle inventory, industrial ecology, carbon neutrality, input-output analysis, sustainability, environmental impact assessment, ILCD