Which is the reference year for the Costs/Revenues of an item in the ecoinvent database?

Question

Hi,

Each version of ecoinvent has a different reference year for currencies.

But I see that, for example, for the product: "computer production, laptop | computer, laptop | Cutoff, U", the Costs/Revenues quantity in both ecoinvent 3.3 and ecoinvent 3.10 is just the same, 860€ (I suspect that it is the same for many other products, too).

It seems that prices are not updated with every new version of ecoinvent, although the reference year for currencies changes. Would you please confirm this, or correct me?

If so, what is the reference year of the product cost/revenue that appears in the database (in outputs section, in openLCA)? Is there any way to know for which year ecoinvent made the cost/revenue estimate?

That year is critical, in order to correctly update prices applying deflation tables.

Thanks,

Gorka

Answer 1

That's a good question. In case you have access to ecoquery, you can see some infos in the exchange details of the reference product and the price property for EUR2005:

Prices are calculated on basis of Industrial Commodity Statistics Database from UN statistics (http://data.un.org ). Commodity: 'Laptop PCs and palm-top organizers'. Only data for 6 countries were available.Prices are calculated on basis of Industrial Commodity Statistics Database from UN statistics (http://data.un.org ). Commodity: 'Laptop PCs and palm-top organizers'. Only data for 6 countries were available.

All prices in ecoinvent are in EUR2005 and I assume that this never changed so far by ecoinvent. The exchange rates to other currencies (average exchange rates between 2018 and 2023 are inserted by us (GreenDelta) in case someone wants to use them and the currency EUR is set as the reference currency to 1.0 in the ecoinvent databases.

In the knowledge base from ecoinvent, you will also find the following info:

Price is added as a property to every product of the database, except waste. The price represents a global and long-term (typically five years) average, in euros. However, rapidly fluctuating market prices and externalities are not reflected in the price.

In the case of multi-output processes, the prices of the various outputs are used to determine the economic allocation factor in the attributional system models. Exceptions may apply where physical product properties must be maintained: heat and power co-generation processes are an example. These products are allocated taking into account the exergy of the generated heat and electricity. The property of the economic allocation factor is called true value.

From time to time ecoinvent updates some prices and mentions these products in the report of changes, but only mentioning the product names that got price updates without any further infos.