Page 162 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

9 Life Cycle Inventory Analysis 147

Table 9.5 (continued)
Name Description References
data quality. Focuses on processes
within Germany
LCA More than 18,000 datasets for U.S. USDA; www.lcacommons.gov
Commons agriculture production and agriculturally
derived products
Ökobaudat German database with around 950 Federal Ministry for the Environment,
environmental product declaration Nature Conservation, Building and
datasets for building materials, building Nuclear Safety; http://www.oekobaudat.
processes and transport processes de/en.html

While a number of LCI databases are available and some of them contain
high-quality data for specific technologies or industries as shown in Table 9.5, the
most comprehensive, and probably most widely used, database is ecoinvent and in the
following section we there focus on this database and encourage the reader to look for
similar information about other databases using the references given in Table 9.5 as
relevant. ecoinvent version 3 contains approximately 12,500 unit processes and each
process exists in an ‘allocation, default’ (or APOS: allocation at the point of substi-
tution), an ‘allocation, recycled content’ (or ‘cut-off’) and a ‘consequential’ version.
The ‘allocation, default’ version uses price as allocation key as a rule, except for a few
processes, where representative physical parameters are used (such as for processes
involving co-production of electricity and heat) where markets are judged distorted
by, e.g., regulation, and also corrects for fluctuating prices by applying three-year,
historical average prices for some processes (Weidema et al. 2013). The cut-off ver-
sion is identical to the default allocation version, except for the handling of recyclable
materials that are cut-off before being sent to recycling. This means that recyclable
materials do not bring any benefits to the primary user of the materials and are
considered available ‘burden-free’ to recycling processes, and that the impacts
attributed to secondary recycled materials are only those of the recycling processes
and the associated transportation. By contrast, in the default allocation version sec-
ondary recycled materials are also allocated a share of the material’s previous life
cycle impacts (based on economic allocation). The existence of the two allocation
approaches for recyclable materials in ecoinvent (‘default’ and ‘cut-off’)reflects the
fact that there is little consensus on how to perform such allocation in the most
reasonable way. The cut-off allocation is the recommended approach in the European
Product Environmental Footprint guideline (EC-JRC 2012).
The consequential version of ecoinvent uses the long-term marginal technology,
which is identified by considering whether a market is increasing (or stable, or
slowly decreasing) or rapidly decreasing, in line with Table 9.1. The ecoinvent
centre advocates the use of the consequential version of the database not only for
large-scale decisions (studied in Situation B studies, according to ILCD), but also
for small-scale decisions, which are by definition too small to cause structural
changes outside the foreground system, i.e. too small to lead to new equipment