EPD for pharmaceuticals and cosmetic products

Question

Greetings.

I am trying to calculate the environmental impacts of pharmaceutical products and cosmetic products.

I am using OpenLCA and EN15804 add-on for ecoinvent 3.9.1. I am not sure this database is enough to find all the eligible processes (chemicals, APIs, etc.).

Can someone guide me where to find the necessary processes inside the EN15804 add-on database, and possibly tell me of another database that may be useful for pharmaceutical products.

Answer 1

Ideally you do the EPD for a foreground system, collect specific data for this, and fill up "the rest" of the life cycle with generic datasets from the database, for the background system, so you do not directly need a "cosmetic product" dataset in the database, right? But this aside, cosmetic products and pharmaceuticals are certainly hard to find in any public LCA database.