Environmental footprint database inconsistencies

Question

Hi everybody,

we are using the EF database 2.0 for the LIFE TTGG project (www.lifettgg.eu), and we have noticed some inconsistencies between the impact generated from the processes listed below and the impact of the same processes reported in the official EF node.

1) Tap water, at use, technology mix, per kg water;

2) water, decarbonised, at plant, technology mix, per kg water

I did not investigate in the node the possible reasons, but the result are different.

I have also noticed some problems related to all the process that uses the end of life fluxes:

1) hazardous waste (unspecified)

2) Hazardous waste (unspec.)

that in the processes:

- Representative sparkling wine, consumption mix, grape production, wine making, packaging, distribution, End- of- Life, 0.75 l of packaged wine

and

- Representative still wine, consumption mix, grape production, wine making, packaging, distribution, End- of- Life, 0.75 l of packaged wine

are reported in input adding to the impact of all the processes that share the same fluxes, also the impact generated by wine production.

Thank you,

Comments

E.g: The process

"Articulated lorry transport, Euro 5, Total weight >32 t (without fuel), consumption mix, to consumer, diesel driven, Euro 5, cargo, more than 32t gross weight / 24,7t payload capacity"

gives me a result of 42.9 kg CO2eq per tkm (without changing any other parameters). This is similar with every other lorry transport dataset

Answer 1

We are using the database for something similar (https://www.geoenvi.eu/), but we haven't noticed so relevant problems. Have you followed the guide provided by OpenLCA for process linking? The problem affects all impact categories?

Comments

Hi, Thank you for your answer,
Regarding water for CC there are some differences, and if you use a great amount of water in the process, the final results are different compared to other software.
For the processes that use hazardous waste, I didn't notice the indication to not use auto-link command. Without using it the result is correct. Thank you!
Nevertheless, I still believe that the representative wine products, having the end-of-life processes in input, present a modelling error.

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Regarding water use, I am thinking that could be related to the regionalization of the flows: EF and OLCA use different regionalization approach in the ILCD structure, but I don't know if this can influence the results. Are the compared results coming from the same EF revision?

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to be fair the nexus website clearly states that the water results might not work, so it should not come as a big surprise

Answer 2

Hi,

I came across the same problem, with other processes in various categories. Apparently you should un-tick the 'Auto-link processes' option when creating the product system to avoid improper connections (see this tutorial).

For example "tailings" are connected to these "still wine" products by default, which means you will them in all of your process trees if you leave "auto-link" on. The downside now is that you have to reconnect the processes manually in the product system but it is important since these wine processes add up quite a bit to the impacts.

Comments

(indeed, you should not auto-connect the PEF database, fully aggregated system processes contain small amounts of input products that seem "leftovers" from an incomplete system calculation, probably in GaBi, and are not meant to establish life cycle connections)

Answer 3

Dear all,

we saw that the water amounts in some processes are indeed strange, and think of releasing a new version, but might wait until version 3 of EF is out. For us, it is really difficult to "scrape" the different datasets from the different nodes. The EC does not operate and provide one central repository for these datasets. Although being declared as EF 2, datasets seem to change on the nodes. I had access to the datasets on one node with my account last year but not any more now. For another node, which was previously not operational, the company does, according to own communication of this company, not have the technical capacity any more to run the server and to acknowledge new users. I think it would be good to motivate the EC to provide the datasets in one central repository.

(not really an answer, I know, but motivated by the question, the responses, and the obvious broad use of these datasets)