How can you know if your impact is big or small?

Question

Hello,

So say I've done an LCIA calculation with the CML baseline method, how do I know if an impact is big, small, average, ...? For example say that abiotic depletion (fossil fuels) is 3.46056e+1, how do I know if this is a lot or not? Can you let OpenLCA colour it in? Or are there tables somewhere?
Thanks in advance for your help!

Kind regards,
Eline

Answer 1

Yes, good point, easy but also difficult question - you can compare against other cases that are public, e.g.. A lot depends on the mere selection of the product amount, since LCAs are typically linear models (1 kg or 1 t of product typically changes results by a factor of 1000 e.g.). You can export results to excel and compare different results there, we have done this for clients also supported by scripts which run automatically. Hth, Andreas