How to apply an ELCD treatment process to a custom waste flow

Question

I have an industrial process that outputs a waste flow called "Process Water" (created by me). To valorise it, it needs to be treated. I found an ELCD process ('Waste water treatment, chemical reduction/oxidation process - RER') that has 'waste water - untreated' as its quantitative reference (negative output) and produces 'waste water - treated' as output.

How do I correctly apply this ELCD process to my custom "Process Water" flow so that the treatment process is triggered and its outputs and considerations (emissions, treated water, etc.) are included in my system?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi, good question -

1, ELCD is really outdated, I would recommend to use other databases (and it seems recently some universities started teaching assigments where students are suggested to use the ELCD database - tell your professors that it is outdated and not flexible and they should better suggest other databases)

2, ELCD has, with few exceptions, only aggregated processes; these cannot be really modified, and this is another drawback of the ELCD database.

3, however, to link the process you found to your model, you need to have the "waste water untreated" flow input into your processes that has waste water in the output. It is not intuitive, this reflects old ecoinvent 2 / SimaPro logic where every product must be on the output side. Think of it as waste water treatment service (output of the treatment plant, input into your process).

Good luck!

Comments

Hi, thank you so much for your reply and for the explanation!

I am modelling a thermochemical conversion of biomass through pyrolysis, and I agree that the ELCD database is quite limited for this purpose. I am mainly using it for the German electricity mix, which is exactly what I need for my system boundary.

Given your feedback, do you know of any more appropriate free databases for this type of study? Everything I found was either paid (like ecoinvent) or not suitable for my case. I would really appreciate any suggestions!

Thank you again!

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sure - check here e.g. https://nexus.openlca.org/databases#free-provider (some are only conditionally free though, such as Agribalyse that requires ecoinvent)