Comparison of environmental impacts of Copper, Aluminum, Lead

Question

Hi! For my thesis I want to assess different materials regarding their environmental impacts. Simply put: What are the impacts of the material production from different metals to climate change, human toxicity etc.?

My approach is to find the most low-level flows (copper wire), create a process with input copper and output copper wire and create a product system of this, so i can calculate the impacts. It seems to work so far, but I wanted to double-check that this makes sense.

Your feedback is highly appreciated, thank you!

Nicolas

Answer 1

If you are only interested in the total impact scores, then I wouldn't hassle with creating product systems using unit processes. I'd go for aggregated processes instead. Depends on what you have in your database.

Comments

In addition, check that the production process (and reference location) fits to what you need, there are several ways to produce copper wire, and you can use copper from different sources evidently.