No inputs in incineration processes

Question

I would like to show the incineration of plastics in openLCA, which generates electricity.  

For this I would use a process from the Ecoinvent database. However, these processes have no input and therefore no environmental impact during incineration.

I do not understand why this is so.

Answer 1

In original ecoinvent datasets, waste treatment processes have a negative output product, since ecoinvent always assumes the product on the output side, and waste to be treated is of course "in real life" entering the process on the input side. This is quite counter-intuitive and we changed this in ecoinvent releases > 3.5.

If you do not have access to ecoinvent 3.6 (from Nexus), you will need to include a "negative waste treatment service for incineration" flow on the input side of your process, received from (!) the waste incineration which has its product as -output.

See also here for an explanation of ecoinvent <= 3.5: https://ask.openlca.org/1949/certain-processes-ecoinvent-modelled-with-negative-output?show=1949#q1949