Page 174 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

9 Life Cycle Inventory Analysis 159

The flow quantities of process tables should either be scaled to 1 unit of the
reference flow of the process (as shown in Table 9.7) or scaled to the quantity of
process reference flow required to meet the reference flow of the study (derived
from the functional unit). For neighbouring background processes (UP1 to UP8 in
Fig. 9.10), the name of the process and the name and version of the database it was
sourced from is sufficient, because the reader may use this information to recreate
the remainder of the background system.
Note that inventory data in the foreground system are sometimes confidential,
for example when a manufacturer wants to prevent the details of the production
processes to be disclosed to the public or competitors. In terms of documenting LCI
results, confidentiality issues can be handled by placing the process tables con-
taining confidential data in an appendix that is only made available to groups of
people that are cleared by the supplier of the data (e.g. employees of the organi-
sation commissioning a study and an external critical reviewer).

9.7.3 Documentation of Metadata

We recommend reporting metadata according to specificity, type, source and access
using the structure of Table 9.2 (introduced for data planning and collection). For
easy overview, the rows of the table should be grouped into life cycle stages. The
data specificity classification (from very low to very high) for each data point
should be transparent, i.e. by writing in the relevant cell why a data point was
classified to a given specificity, rather than simply making a cross. The docu-
mentation of these metadata should be consistent with the documentation of unit
processes described in Table 9.7, and cross-references between the two should be
made (e.g. notes and data sources reported in tables documenting unit processes
may readily refer to the table with metadata) We advocate reporting metadata in the
main part of the LCA report.

9.7.4 Documentation of LCI Results

The LCI results should simply be documented as a list of quantified elementary
flows, divided into resources and emissions, i.e. as in Table 9.7. This typically
consists of an extensive table, which can be documented as an appendix for
readability of the LCA report.