As an immediate mitigation measure, we call for replacing proxies as fast as possible by including the processspecific energy and water demand values from published data sources, several of which have been identified in this article . Proxy data should only be used for remaining gaps that cannot be filled by any other means. For P R E -P R I N T that, company-wide environmental reports of major players in the chemical sector with a much larger production volume coverage than the currently used data could help to improve proxy representativeness. An alternative approach with proxies derived from manufacturing process-based data provides the option to additionally distinguish key features of different types of chemical synthesis pathways (like exothermal and endothermal processes, reaction and purification requirements, or different types of chemicals). The latter approach can furthermore help to avoid problems with regards to incomplete company reporting and issues with regards to the exact system boundary, that have proven to be problematic in the approach ecoinvent currently uses. Finding the most meaningful level of complexity for such an approach would need more research, though, and should also consider alternative approaches like using modern cheminformatics, natural language processing or machine learning to unlock the full potential of existing data in the literature.