This paper presents the authors' efforts towards the development of an effective and friendly working tool for fuzzy arithmetic. It describes the two programming libraries currently produced. The first, implemented using the Fortran language, provides high precision computational capabilities, to demonstrate the feasibility and the correctness of a practical use of fuzzy arithmetic. The second, implemented in an object-oriented environment using the C ++ language, aims at being a powerful, friendly and highly portable tool to support generic users needing to manage imprecise data. Moreover, a simple application to environmental impact analysis is described to show the advantages deriving from the practical use of fuzzy arithmetic.