When carrying out a Life Cycle Assessment, it is essential to rely on background processes inventories that well represent different stages of a product life cycle. ecoinvent is the world’s leading Life Cycle Inventory database, which contains more than 20,000 datasets, encompassing energy, materials production, processing and waste treatment. Many of these datasets are used to support the life cycle representation of other ecoinvent processes, i.e. it is an interconnected database.
The Cornerstone project, developed by ACV Brasil and commissioned by the Brazilian Life Cycle Assessment Corporate Network, aims to adapt and reconnect ecoinvent datasets to better represent the Brazilian situation. Within the scope of this project, criteria were created for prioritizing datasets, which will undergo meticulous adjustments and connections. Among those criteria is the number of times a dataset is used by other ecoinvent datasets.
The accompanying chart shows the number of times each dataset is connected in the ecoinvet 3.6. While 9.8% of datasets presents more than 100 connections, 76% of datasets are called by others less than 10 times. The LCA software used was SimaPro 9.
Get in contact with us for more information on the project mentioned above, on ecoinvent, SimaPro and much more!