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Question

Hello everyone,

I have started to use openLCA since this week and I'm trying to learn about it. This could be a silly question, forgive me.

I watched the tutorial about the LCA of a bottle and I have seen that in the processes they didn't insert any environmental flows like emissions in air and similar. Then I watched another tutorial about the production of carrots where they instead inserted the environmental flows like phosphate and similar.

So my question is: when do I have to insert environmental flows in the processes?

Really thanks for answers.

Answer 1

Well, the answer is quite easy:

- if you work with unit processes, then you need to include elementary flows (this is what you mean by environmental flows, I think?) where they occur, so emissions in these processes where the emissions happen. If you look at some generic databases, you see how this is meant to be done (and can connect these processes to those created by you).

- if you work with system processes, they already contain the elementary flows from the "rolled up" supply chain, as overall calculation result, and you can and need to take them as they are, there are very rare cases where you can reasonably change them in system processes.

Hope this helps!

Andreas

Comments

Many thanks, you have been clear!