Where to change Transport capacity utilization in openLCA

Question

Hello

I am currently doing an LCA, and regarding the transport of a floorheating pipe. In this case we as the project team wanted to see and/or change the Transport capacity utilization factor for the different transport options, but are unable to locate the place in the program to do so.

Is this even an option in openLCA or do the program already factor this into the calculations? If not, how do you proceed with this issue.

We are working with the ecoinvent 3.8 database.

Answer 1

Hi, good question, and short answer: this is unfortunately not possible in ecoinvent. Ecoinvent uses a rather simple transportation model, where every truck operates with 50% payload (logic: 100% payload to the client, 0% payload back to the factory - I think), and you cannot change it. There are other sources where the transport is modeled in a more detailed way, using a formula for the payload, e.g. hbefa (https://www.hbefa.net/e/index.html) or tremod (https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/aktualisierung-tremod-2019) but not integrated into ecoinvent.

Best wishes,

Andreas

Comments

Hi folks,
My understanding from contacting ecoinvent is that they do not assume a 50% utilization. Instead. they base it off statistics (though outdated):
average payload = total tkm/total vkm

The total vkm includes empty trips as well.  I can't easily find what % empty is considered, but other sources say around 25%.

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You are right, ecoinvent does not exactly assume 50%, but but a fix number, see also here https://www.greendelta.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Keynote_22nd_reality_olcaconf26_ac_compressed.pdf