Activity variable calculation in soca

Question

Hello,

the calculation of the worker hours in soca is not fully clear to me, therefore I would like to ask here about some details.

The documentation describes that in the second step of the working hour calculation the worker hours from a PSILCA process is mapped to the corresponding ecoinvent process and multiplied with the "costs for the reference product" in ecoinvent. (Eisfeldt, F. (2017). Soca v. 1 add-on: adding social impact information to ecoinvent. GreenDelta GmbH, Berlin.) Now from my understanding this is repeated for the supply chain of the process. 

What is confusing to me, is that the full price was already considered and not only the value added within the unit process itself, therefore the further addition of the upstream processes could lead to double counting if I understood well the method description. Is this the case and is it somehow avoided in soca?

Thank you very much in advance for your help!

Lukas

Answer 1

Hi Lukas, this calculation is done in the database where the process is not linked yet in a supply chain but "standalone", and the costs are the direct costs for the product of this process. This way, this calculation does not lead to double counting. Would you agree?

Comments

Hi Andreas,

thank you very much for your answer and your time.

From my understanding of the soca report the costs are based on ecoinvent prices. These prices are taken for example from UN Comtrade and therefore represent the price of the product
and not the price of the unit process itself (for example the price for the manufacturing of the product).

However maybe I am misunderstanding the further processing: Are the costs of the inputs subtracted in the next step, and if yes how?

I am very thankful for more input.

Best regards,
Lukas