Dear ecoinvent,
I have a question regarding data for gravel production in ecoinvent v3 data base. Both for case of crushed and round one the transportation included in the internal process of production has been excluded. I was wondering what might be the reason and should it manually be input for the case which is being examined or it is somehow included in the process?
Dear Aml,
Thank you very much for your question.
As an example, let us take the activity “gravel and sand quarry operation” for the geography CH. Here it says in the “Included Activities End” comment: “The dataset includes the whole manufacturing process for digging of gravel round and sand (no crushed gravel), internal processes (transport, etc.), infrastructure for the operation (machinery) and land-use of the mine (incl. unpaved roads).”
Since this dataset was already contained in the ecoinvent database version 2, you can also take a look at its documentation in the ecoinvent reports of version 2, available here: https://ecoinvent.org/the-ecoinvent-database/login/ (You need to log into Version 1+2 and then look at report “07 Building Products” under Reports)
In the documentation it says that the material transport is mainly transported by conveyor belt, which is included in the dataset. Internal transport is also done by machinery, which is covered by the exchange “diesel, burned in building machine”. So the transport for internal processes is indeed included through the conveyor belt. However, what is not included in the dataset is the transport of personnel on the site. The lorry transport from the original documentation has been removed for version 3 as it is now covered by transport taking place under market activities.
I hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any other questions.
Best regards,
Lea Wollensack
Junior Data Analyst, ecoinvent Association
Thank you very much. This was really helpful.