The latest version of the ecoinvent database, version 3.7, released on September 17th, 2020, features more than 900 new datasets, among them 100 new products, and 1000 updated datasets. Few of the major updates and additions are listed below:
New and updated datasets
– Building and construction materials: ecoinvent 3.7 introduces an updated version of glass wool mat datasets.
– Electricity: ecoinvent 3.7 comes with new data on biogas production and supply chains for Switzerland. Moreover, attributional electricity market mixes have been updated for all countries.
– Fertilisers: The market and market mixes for fertilisers have been restructured and updated, now reflecting the separate provision of organic and mineral fertilisers for nutrient supply.
– Metals: LCI data has been updated for copper, nickel, iron and steel, and scarce metals such as cobalt, rare earths, tungsten, and beryllium. Also, aluminium data was revised for North America.
– Paper and Pulp: Packaging-related material was updated with the help of industry associations´ data.
– Waste treatment and recycling: The Waste Treatment and Recycling sector has been enhanced with new data on recycling activities of packaging materials, namely a range of new regional data for Europe and Switzerland on the recycling of beverage cans and paperboard.
– Wood: most of the datasets related to forestry activities and wood processing in the forestry and wood sector are updated. Further, new wood-based products have been added, such as cross-laminated timber, structural timber, three and five layered board, and tubular
particleboard.
Database-wide changes
– Some of the processes and products have been renamed in version 3.7 of the database in order to better reflect the dataset. For instance, process – ‘biogas, burned in micro gas turbine 100kWe’ from ecoinvent v3.6 is renamed as ‘biomethane, low pressure burned in micro gas turbine 100kWe’ in ecoinvent v3.7. A list of the changes can be found in the report of changes from the ecoinvent website.
– The prices of several products have been adjusted, sometimes only minorly. For the attributional models, this will affect the results if economic allocation is applied.
– Technology level to modern updated for nine processes in the consequential system model.
Get ecoinvent 3.7 for openLCA
ecoinvent 3.7 is available for download for openLCA exclusively on https://nexus.openlca.org. Please note that versions of ecoinvent 3.7 obtained elsewhere will not be compatible with openLCA. In addition, users with an ecoinvent 3.7 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 necessary. However, special attention should be paid to integration of older versions of ecoinvent databases (3.5 and older) with ecoinvent version 3.7 database owing
to the changes in the waste modelling approach in openLCA. Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods package by ecoinvent 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 method package with about 40 LCIA methods is also possible.
Livestream scheduled
We have scheduled a YouTube livestream in order to introduce the mejor changes in the database to our users, on November 6th, 2020. The livestream will be lead by our CEO Andreas Ciroth and our data analyst Salwa Burhan.