Abstract
Purpose
Elementary flows are essential components of data used for life cycle assessment. A standard list is not used across all sources, as data providers now manage these flows independently. Elementary flows must be consistent across a life cycle inventory for accurate inventory analysis and must correspond with impact methods for impact assessment. With the goal of achieving a global network of LCA databases, a critical review of elementary flow usage and management in LCA data sources was performed.
Methods
Flows were collected in a standard template from various life cycle inventory, impact method, and software sources. A typology of elementary flows was created to identify flows by types such as chemicals, minerals, land flows, etc., to facilitate differential analysis. Twelve criteria were defined to evaluate flows against principles of clarity, consistency, extensibility, translatability, and uniqueness.
Results and discussion
Over 134,000 elementary flows from six LCI databases, three LCIA methods, and three LCA software tools were collected and evaluated from European, North American, and Asian Pacific LCA sources. The vast majority were typed as “Element or Compound” or “Group of Chemicals” with less than 10% coming from the other seven types. Many lack important identifying information including context information (environmental compartments), directionality (LCIA methods generally do not provide this information), additional clarifiers such as CAS numbers and synonyms, unique identifiers (like UUIDs), and supporting metadata. Extensibility of flows is poor because patterns in flow naming are generally complex and inconsistent because user-defined nomenclature is used.
Conclusions
The current shortcomings in flow clarity, consistency, and extensibility are likely to make it more challenging for users to properly select and use elementary flows when creating LCA data and make translation/conversion between different reference lists challenging and loss of information will likely occur.
Recommendations
We recommend the application of a typology to flow lists, use of unique identifiers and inclusion of clarifiers based on external references, setting an exclusive or inclusive nomenclature for flow context information that includes directionality and environmental compartment information, separating flowable names from context and unit information, linking inclusive taxonomies to create limited patterns for flowable names, and using an encoding schema that will prevent technical translation errors.
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Notes
CORINE is a land classification system.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support of the members of the Global LCA Data Access (GLAD) initiative, of which this work is a part. This research was facilitated by an in-kind research contribution by USEPA to GLAD. This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program at the NRML/ORD, US Environmental Protection Agency, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the US Department of Energy and EPA. The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) provided financial support for Gregor Wernet to participate in this critical review; GreenDelta provided time for Cristina Rodriguez to participate. Comments provided by presentation of preliminary results at the meeting of the Global Network of LCA Databases in Brasilia in March 2016 strengthened the quality of this study. We thank all data providers for their help with providing complete elementary flows lists for their databases.
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Edelen, A., Ingwersen, W.W., Rodríguez, C. et al. Critical review of elementary flows in LCA data. Int J Life Cycle Assess 23, 1261–1273 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-017-1354-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-017-1354-3