The Oiconomy Pricing Assessment Tool leads the practitioner through all stages of the product life cycle, and aspects of sustainability, through the following functions:

1. By means of an excel-tool covering all aspects of PPP (People, Planet and Prosperity), it leads the practitioner to measure the full sustainability of the product.
2. End-producers or retailers take the lead in applying the assessment.
3. The 80% most relevant upstream supply chains are selected and included in the assessment.
4. Each (selected) value chain partner calculates its own ESCU’s and keeps its own bookkeeping, following the Oiconomy Pricing Standard and filling the Oiconomy questionnaire in the tool.
5. Only the aggregated information about ESCU’s is transferred to the next value chain actor. This way, confidential information remains safe.
6. ESCU’s are transferred as one total value, but also separately for the 10 aspect categories (see aspects on the section below).
7. The end-producer makes the final calculation. Only end-producers include the ESCU’s for the use- and end-of life-phases of the product.
8. By means of well-specified questions for each sustainability aspect, the tool challenges companies to self-provide their specific (“foreground”) preventive costs or, in other words, the extra costs (without margin) for the sustainable version of the product.
9. Where specific data is not available, the tool gives default values (“background” preventive costs) and makes most calculations automatically.
10. Under strict rules, Bonus ESCU’s are allocated for activities benefitting the society.

ESCU Scheme

Sustainability categories included in the Oiconomy Pricing Standard: 

1. Pollution & Climate.
2. Depletion & Waste.
3. Land use.
4. Ecosystem degradation & Biodiversity.
5. Human Health.
6. Labour.
7. Social Responsibilities
8. Economic responsibilities.
9. Corruption and conflict.
10. Positive externalities (Bonus)

Tool availability:

If you would like to use the tool, you can contact us about applying under conditions the current version 2.04. To signal your interest, send an email to oiconomy@uu.nl

Please indicate your company (including country and website), the purpose of the assessment, and product(s) to be assessed.

To get an idea of the functionality of the tool, a read-only version of the Oiconomy Assessment Tool is presented below:

Oiconomy Assessment Tool v2.01 -View version

Please find the information on the Oiconomy standard below:

Oiconomy Standard v2.04.pdf

Academic publications on Oiconomy Pricing are available here

Intellectual property rights

• Utrecht University and the Oiconomy Foundation remain the owners and shall retain control of the Oiconomy Pricing Standard and the Oiconomy Pricing Assessment Tool.
• Changes and/or decisions about adjustments of the Oiconomy Pricing Standard and Oiconomy Pricing Assessment Tool will be made by Utrecht University and the Oiconomy Foundation only.
• Results of applying the Oiconomy Pricing Assessment Tool should be communicated to Utrecht University (see email address above) and can only be published in any form with reference to and after informing Utrecht University and Oiconomy Foundation. When publishing any result, users comply to refer to the Oiconomy Pricing Standard as “For this publication, the Oiconomy Pricing Standard v.2.0x and the Oiconomy Pricing Assessment Tool v.2.0x have been applied, as provided by Utrecht University and Oiconomy Foundation on oiconomy.geo.uu.nl .”
• Support in the application of the Oiconomy Pricing Assessment Tool by third parties is currently not approved by Utrecht University and Oiconomy Foundation. We are training a pool of experts within the coming year to ensure the diffusion of the implementation.