ecoinvent Forum Archive

Hi

I’m new to EcoInvent and am trying to use it to determine where the largest emissions are coming from, as part of an analysis of how to best reduce co2 emissions. For example, if I’m looking at ‘rye seed production, for sowing’, how do I:

• estimate the final CO2-Eq emissions?
• get a breakdown of emissions by all activities that contributed?

I’ve started to look at the activities in ‘ecoinvent 3.7.1_cutoff_lci_ecoSpold02’ and am following the instructions outlined in ‘ecoinvent 3_instructions for matrix building from spold.pdf’, is this the correct approach to use?

Thanks

Dear User,

Thank you for your email. From your email I gather that you are not using any software in combination with the ecoinvent database. Regarding your questions:

• estimate the final CO2-Eq emissions? For this we have several indicators that you can access in the LCIA tab of the dataset. For CO2-Eq the IPCC GWP 100a is a prominently used indicator. However there are also other ones available.
• get a breakdown of emissions by all activities that contributed? This can not be done automatically in ecoQuery. Either you manually pull the emissions for each input of the dataset and scale it according to the amount or you use a software tool. We provide a list of software tools that work with the ecoinvent database on our “Resellers” page. If you can code, you may use the matrices in the file “universal_matrix_export_3.7.1_cut-off.7z” (instead of building them from the spold files, as instructed in ‘ecoinvent 3_instructions for matrix building from spold.pdf’). With the matrices, you may quickly collect all the inputs to each process. You may then calculate the contributions, either by calculating the scores with the matrices, or by reading them from the excel file “ecoinvent 3.7.1_cutoff_lcia-cumulated-matrices_xls.7z”.

I hope this is of help to you.

Best regards,

Johannes Müller, Data Analyst, ecoinvent association