Using Plastics Europe datasets in OpenLCA

Question

Hello there,

I am working on an LCA of  a product that uses POM. Plastics Europe has a dataset on this material, and I have imported the ILCD successfully to Ecoinvent. But when I use the POM flow as an input I cannot select the provider, so it does not account for the contributions to the impact assessment.

I have followed the advice in this link on another question on this forum back from 2017, but does not seem to work. Is there anyway to make that dataset work in OpenLCA?

Than you in advance, any guidance is gold.

Answer 1

Hi Beatriz,

I tried to reproduce your case. The issue is that the EcoProfiles had been built with GaBi times ago. Without a mapping file, they are not easily integratable in openLCA using ecoinvent databases. As you see, all the inputs are empty but all outputs are there but not mapped (the elementary flows don't have the same name as in ecoinvent). If those flows are not mapped, they will be NOT assessed in the LCIA (you can cross-check with our LCIA checks in the result section). The best solution would be to create a mapping file but this is very time-consuming. The most convenient but not perfect solution would be to manually integrate most flows from the report provided in the zip folder and build the process yourself in the ecoinvent flow system. As the POM process exists in the EF 3.1 database you can roughly compare your results with this one. Best

Comments

Thank you for the reply!

When you say "to manually integrate most flows from the report provided in the zip folder and build the process yourself in the ecoinvent flow system", what report are you refering too? Is it to the flows in here (https://plasticseurope.lca-data.com/datasetdetail/process.xhtml?lang=en&uuid=e3b65970-3420-43e6-8265-131ef3485c27&version=01.00.000)?
If I go via this route, and there are flows I cannot find in Ecoinvent, what's the best way to proceed?

Thank you in advance.