The latest version 3.10 of the ecoinvent database includes new impact assessment methods and major updates of the sectors Agriculture, Building and Construction, Chemicals, Electricity, Forestry and Wood, Fuels, Metals, Packaging, Pulp and Paper, and Waste. It contains updated data for oil and gas supply chains (2021), updated data for market and electricity mixes (2020 and 2021), updated data for residual mixes (2022), new data for construction, packaging, hard coal and chemicals (for example hydrogen and methanol production).
Further information can be found on the ecoinvent website:
Three system models of ecoinvent 3.10 are available for openLCA: Cutoff (Allocation, cut-off by classification), APOS (Allocation at the point of substitution) and Consequential (Substitution, consequential, long-term). In the following, some main differences and updates to the newest version 3.10 are given. This information has been adapted from the ecoinvent website (see the ecoinvent links from above).
Please note that the latest version of openLCA should be used with this database, >= v.2.0.4.
New and updated datasets
Petroleum and Natural Gas
Version 3.10 features an extensive full-scale update of petroleum and natural gas supply chains, incorporating the latest statistical data from 2021.
Other Fuels
Version 3.10 will introduce data modeling for the production of hard coal coke in China.
Chemicals
Unit process data for olefins and aromatics have replaced aggregated data. Additionally, new datasets modeling the production of hydrogen, methanol, chlorine, and cooling energy supply have been added.
Electricity
Market mixes have been updated with data from 2020, and for selected countries like China, India, and the United States, data from 2021 has been included. The residual mix markets for EU-28 and several other European countries have been refreshed based on 2022 data.
Waste
Version 3.10 contains fully disaggregated waste treatment chains, offering a more in-depth view of environmental impacts associated with waste treatment steps.
Agriculture
Datasets covering barley, oat, wheat, and rapeseed production in Australia, as well as data for potato, sweet corn, soybean, and maize production have been added for version 3.10. This includes detailed data modeling machinery and field operations in both countries.
Construction
Regionalized data for various construction materials, covering Tunisia, Ecuador, and Switzerland, have been introduced.
In addition, we improved the openLCA implementation:
- All ecoinvent impact methods include now a short documentation and the links to sources that are provided by ecoinvent.
- All processes include now sector tags, for example “Sector: Chemicals”, to enable easy sector and grouping analysis of the results.
- All impact contributions from each sector tag inside the “Tags” results add up to the total impacts.
- All exchanges include now prices to enable consistent calculations of supply chain costs and revenues from existing ecoinvent price data.
- All exchange prices are either directly from ecoinvent data sets (only provided for the quantitative reference and recyclables) or from calculations of the default provider prices times the exchange amounts.
- All validation checks pass the tests.
- All exchanges inside processes include now the location from the default provider (to faster see and catch provider from different locations than the process).
- All ecoinvent elementary flows that are used inside the ecoinvent impact methods or inside the ecoinvent processes are included in the databases (also if they are not used inside processes, but only used in the methods).
- All locations are now sorted into folders.
- All geometries of the locations are now updated to the Natural Earth Data version 5.1.1 provided by ecoinvent.
- All locations now include the description of overlapping regions/countries.
- All recycled content cut-off processes (empty cut-off processes) and recycled content cut-off flows (cut-off recyclables) are sorted into one folder.
- All product flows include now descriptions in case the data is available from ecoinvent.
- All flows include the CAS numbers, formula, synonyms in case the data that is available from ecoinvent.
- All openLCA currencies are updated to average exchange rates between 2019 and 2023 (past 5 years).
- All versions and change dates are set to zero inside database elements to easily track user changes from the initial release version.
- Only flow properties and unit groups that are used inside the database are included in the databases for having a clean overview. But more flow properties and unit groups can be imported any time from other databases or existing project.
- Some flow properties and unit groups are renamed (no change of the UUID) to harmonise the naming.
- The flow property and unit group for the standard volume “Sm3” is changed to the general volume “m3”.
- Different process UUIDs are used for the system process databases to permit combinations with the same unit process databases if needed.
- Normalisation and weighting factors are added to the “EF v3.1” ecoinvent implementation method.
- Uncertainty values for exchanges with Gaussian distributions (only ca. 0.3% of all exchanges in the databases) are removed due to inconsistencies that are found between the mean and sigma values.
- Some elementary flow UUIDs are changed, as it is also done in previous database versions, to map the openLCA UUIDs and to prepare all databases for compatibility to the upcoming openLCA methods package releases (the next version will be the openLCA methods package 2.4.0 and it will be compatible).
Get ecoinvent 3.10 for openLCA
ecoinvent 3.10 for openLCA is available for download exclusively on https://nexus.openlca.org. Please note that versions of ecoinvent 3.10 obtained elsewhere will not be compatible with openLCA. Users with a valid licence maintenance will be able to download this version of ecoinvent already.
In addition, users with an ecoinvent 3.10 license will also receive access to older versions of ecoinvent. All the different data packs can be used as independent databases in openLCA or combined together, if needed. However, special attention should be paid to integrating older versions of ecoinvent databases with the newest ecoinvent v3.10 database due to the modification of the UUID of some processes and flows.
Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods implementations by ecoinvent are included in the databases and are available via openLCA Nexus too. With this package it is possible to reproduce the LCIA results provided by the ecoinvent Association. However, the use of the openLCA LCIA methods package is also possible and recommended by GreenDelta. The newest openLCA methods package with compatibility to ecoinvent 3.10 will be openLCA LCIA Methods v2.4 (planned release end of January ’24).