Dear James,
Thank you for you post. Please find my answers to your questions down below:
we have downloaded the database. of these data, I uploaded the consequential database into openLCA in order to compile my inventories but some of them(inventory data) are not found in it. Can I upload any of the rest (cut-off, apos) into consequential and continue the search of the remaining database? where should I get the rest of my inventory data?
To our knowledge the only way to integrate the ecoinvent database in OpenLCA is through the integration process by Greendelta, the company publishing OpenLCA. As we do not have any control over this process I ask you to please contact them for help or issues with OpenLCA.
what are actual the differences between the consequential, APOS, and cut-off database?
As a start, I recommend you to check out this page of our website: System Models in ecoinvent 3. Cut-off, APOS and consequential are system models. In short, a system model describes a set of rules with which the datasets in their undefined state are linked and which are used to calculated the LCIs of the datasets. So each of the system model handles certain aspects of the linking process differently and is able to answer some questions better than the others. It is worth spending some understanding the differences between the system models, which will help you choose the right one for your purpose. The resulting datasets produced by the system models cannot be mixed. For new users we usually recommend to use the cut-off system model as this is the most approachable of the three.
lastly, every LCIA method of my loaded database are identified as obsolete even though they were downloaded simultaneously with the package. how can this be handled?
If an LCIA method is marked as “obsolete” it means the characterization factors have not been updated in the update to ecoinvent v3.6. The term is slightly misleading, however, this should not be the case for all of the LCIA methods. The following should not carry this tag (v3.6):
- Cumulative energy demand
- Ecological footprint
- Ecological scarcity 2013 (+not LT)
- Ecosystem damage potential
- ILCD 2.0 2018 midpoint (+no LT)
- IPCC 2013 (+no LT)
- ReCiPe V1.13 (E/H/I)
- Selected LCI results (additional)
Please also take note of our FAQ and Documents & Files section on our website where you can find additional information and files to help you understand and use the database.
Best regards,
Johannes Müller, Junior Data Analyst, ecoinvent association