LCIA Method Environmental Footprint 3.0 in openLCA

Question

Hello,

is there any pratical way to use the latest Environmental Footprint method (V.3.0) published by the ILCD in openLCA already?

Or do I have to wait until it is included in an update of the LCIA methods?

The Environmental Footprint method 3.0 is not inlcuded in the latest package " openLCA LCIA methods v2.0.4", thats the version 2.0.

Thanks for any advice

Answer 1

Sorry for a late reply, I tried to get an update from the EC here, but did not get one and thus should probably answer here. We do not include the EF 3.0 method yet since the available LCI data are also not consistently available yet in version 3.0. The data management in EF is a bit surprising, as you probably know, there are different nodes who somehow self-declare the version of the data they provide, and they are not in sync.

The ecoinvent chemicals node, for example, declares version > 3.0, https://ecoinvent.lca-data.com/:

thinkstep nodes declare to be in version 2, http://lcdn.thinkstep.com/Node/:

We do not get an offical "package" from the EC, but the idea is, as far as I understand, that we download everything individually to make it available for openLCA. In absence of a consistent 3.0 inventory package, it does not make much sense to include an updated LCIA method package (I think - if you have comments, let me know).

Best wishes,

Andreas

Comments

Thank you for your reply

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Hi Andreas,

is there any update on this issue? Will EF 3.0 be "released" in some way as impact category or is there at least another approach how to apply the defined impact assessment methods for openLCA results?

Thanks in advance!
Best regards

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Update: yes and no - we thoroughly checked the EF methods and found that we had not included one flow, hard coal in ground, and thus results for fossil resource use were too low - we fixed this and have released a new method pack 2.1.1 end of last week. The release procedure for the data is of course not in our hands; we'll do some more checks on our side (for the 2.0 pack) but for 3.0, we'll have to wait, and I think we'll again need to collect from the various nodes, as described above.