How can I integrate interconnected transportation in my LCA boundary?

Question

I am conducting an LCA for a product that is constructed at the final user's site. The system boundary has three transport routes: supplier to manufacturer's site,  manufacturer's site to client's site, and direct transport from supplier to end-user's site. The weight of material transported from the suppliers to the manufacturer's site is equivalent to the total weight of the manufactured components transported by the manufacturer to the end-user's site, but their transport distances and mode of transport are different (land and sea transport). I do not want to double count, how can I best model these transport scenarios to obtain accurate results?

Any suggestion will be helpful.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi, interesting question, with several possibilities; a clean way to model this would be to make three processes (manufacturing, client, end user) and consider the transport efforts in each of these processes (so, simply add transport at the input of each); you will need to add a product that connects these processes, which can be "product from manufacturing to client", "product from client to end consumer". Or, you can integrate all the transportation effort in one process. As the model is linear, the result is the same. You can check how ecoinvent does the market processes, where also different transportation is input into one process.

Good luck!

Andreas