Can scaling up the product system in the targeted amount be accurate?

Question

I have initially modeled a whole supply chain for 10kg of material as the output by using several and so many parameters, when I prompt the product system to calculate the the impacts, it inquires me about the targeted amount, which I naturally put as 10kg. However, if I want to calculate the impacts for 500kg, would I need to change all the inputs by changing the parameters, or just write 500kg as my targeted amount of calculation for the product system. Would the latter option be even accurate?
TIA!

Answer 1

Hi, well according to the commonly used attributional LCA approach, everything in LCA is linear and thus if you need 50 times more product, you can indeed just multiply the results by 50. The calculation of the product system will also exactly show 50 times higher impacts, you can try it.

All the best,

Andreas

- and it is clear that this is a simplication of reality, maybe not between 10 and 500 kg but if you scale up to 5 trillion tonnes or so