Market-based system delimitation may reduce the need for data collection in life cycle assessments (LCAs) without compromising reliability. Rather than including all potential suppliers and customers (e.g. in a weighted average), the market-based procedure allows the data collection to be reduced to those suppliers and customers, which are actually affected by a studied product substitution. Furthermore, the uncertainty on the market data will most often determine the level to which the overall uncertainty of the LCA can be reduced, thus providing a limit for what process data it is meaningful to collect.