ecoinvent Forum Archive

Dear Ecoinvent,

I'm looking at the results of "treatment of waste plastic, mixture, municipal incineration", for RoW, with a consequential approach. I'm looking at the ReCiPe Midpoint, and noticed there are several negative results, e.g. in the categories of human toxicity, and natural land occupation.

I'm guessing such negative values are due to the avoided impacts of performing waste incineration", but I'm not completely sure. Perhaps you can elaborate what causes it?

Thank you.

Best Regards,

Tobias

Dear Tobias,

Thank you for your thread. I checked the dataset you are refering to for version 3.6 and ReCiPe Midpoint (H) V1.13, in human toxicity. Indeed the negative score stems from the avoided production of heat. Ultimately, heat from the waste incineration is substituting "heat from other than natural gas" and creates this score you observe. It is easier to check this within a software. ecoquery is also possible but a bit tedious. You will need to check the scores of the different inputs in ecoquery.

Best regards,

Avraam Symeonidis,

Data analyst, ecoinvent association 

Dear Avraam,

Thank you very much for your insight.

Best regards,

Tobias