Revenues in Life Cycle Costing LCC

Question

Hi Community,

I'm trying to conduct a Life Cycle Costing (LCC) analysis for my LCA, but I keep getting results that seem far too low. I believe this is because the revenues of each process are being subtracted from the costs, which causes the costs of every process from ecoinvent to be zero.

Does anyone know how I can set the revenues of all processes in my product system to zero and include only the costs in the calculation?

Thank you in advance and best regards,
Jonathan

Answer 1

Hey Jonathan,

Do you have a more specific example? In ecoinvent, there is costs inside each reference product. Be aware that these costs are only for allocation purposes, for hotspots screenings or very rough estimates. The prices from ecoinvent are only per flow and not per exchange, so you will find e.g. the same price for electricity in the whole world.

Technically, openLCA will calculate the costs from inputs and outputs of all processes in the product system. The output costs of each process is typically the price of the reference flow and input costs of each process are known by the amount and the price of the provider flow.

In case you calculate the LCC for an ecoinvent process, make sure to copy/paste it and to remove the price from the reference product. Otherwise this price will also go into the result as a revenue.

Also check the contribution tree to see the contribution and the cost values of each input and output.

Best wishes,

Conrad

Comments

Hard to know what is the problem without pictures and seeing how the processes are modeled. In openLCA you get easy sums of inputs and outputs, also the provider costs are automatically calculated from the costs of the reference product in the supply chains. So there is nothing hidden or complex behind.

You also have to take care how you model your waste and product flows and to model it correctly, since a waste in the output has a cost, a product in the output has a revenue, a waste in the input has a revenue and a product in the input has a cost. But this is all indicated by the colors, too, and can be also inverted with negative signs if needed somehow.