Since the 90s there have been a number of research projects attempting to model the environmental impact of products in ERP systems and so integrate environmental impacts into the operative decision-making and communication of companies with their customers. Such concepts have however so far failed to become comprehensively established in practice because of the high initial costs. In this paper we propose an approach and a reference architecture that allows an increasing level of automation when calculating environmental impact by using existing data from external databases. We concentrate on the operations of a company that would like to make environmental impact data available to its customers.