Trade-offs refer to the way that sustainability efforts might reduce emissions within one targeted category, but unintentionally cause harmful environmental impacts across a different category. For example, if an initiative focused solely on reducing GHG emissions, the choice might be made to switch to on-site solar production. In doing so, although the GHG emissions from fuel use would decrease, land use or freshwater withdrawal might increase, and remain unaccounted for. It is important to evaluate whether the unintended consequences of sustainability efforts create environmental harm beyond the intended benefit. 

Evaluation of trade-offs is complex and requires awareness of trends across a wide variety of environmental indicators. This project assists producers and distributors by providing data, graphs, and analysis of the relationships between five major environmental indicators, alongside several commodity-specific indicators. By establishing the presence or lack of correlations between different environmental indicators, this project assists in optimization of sustainability efforts, and helps with decision making to best ameliorate environmental impact.