How is Water use calculated in open LCA EF 3.1?

Question

Hello,

I am having troubles knowing how Open LCA uses E.F v3.1 to calculate water use. This is because I have an elementary flow in the output of my process, but it's adding to the final result instead of subtracting. I am returning water to the environment in gaseous form; why should that increase my water use?

Can anyone help me? Thank you so much

Answer 1

The ecoinvent LCIA methods have a different approach on how to characterize water use, but it should lead to the same result (unregionalized result) if modeled correctly.

I gave an answer to this matter here: https://ask.openlca.org/8073/water-use-recipe-calculation-with-ecoinvent

Did you use the ecoinvent LCIA methods for EF 3.1 or the openLCA LCIA methods for EF 3.1?