Question About LCA Commons Database Options

Question

Greetings,

I hope you are doing well. I am an academic user based in the United States, and I recently purchased an ecoinvent 3.12 license. I am also interested in purchasing an LCA Commons database.

Could you please explain the key differences between LCA Commons 2025 (ecoinvent 3.11 Cutoff) and the standard LCA Commons database? I would also appreciate your recommendation on which option would be more suitable for modeling the life-cycle environmental impacts of chemicals and plastics in the United States. If I purchase the standard LCA Commons database, will it be automatically linked to my ecoinvent 3.12 databse?

Thank you for your assistance.

Best regards,
K

Answer 1

Sure - LCACommons alone has some incomplete supply chains since quite models were initially modelled with ecoinvent and the ecoinvent processes cannot be included in the publicly distributed LCACommons DB. In the LCA Commons 2025 (ecoinvent 3.11 Cutoff) these supply chains have been completed with ecoinvent datasets. As this creation was some effort, we charge a fee for this combined database (and you need a Nexus ecoinvent license). As the name says, the database is linked to 3.11 but we are currently working on the link to 3.12.

All the best,

Andreas