LCA Commons is available from the LCA Digital Commons website of the US Department of Agriculture, where various different repositories from different entities generating LCA data and managing LCA databases in the US are contained and provided to the public. In October 2023, the entire content of these repositories was downloaded, with the intention to provide it for openLCA, and has been made available now in openLCA Nexus.
During the preparation, several aspects were modified in the data, to curate data, and to improve user experience. These are documented in the attached document also in the Nexus, LCA Commons page, under “Documents” tab.
All in all, the following points were acted upon:
(Major points)
- allocation factors do not sum to 1
- invalid exchange flow @ 0
- error in exchange formula
- has multiple impact factors in impact category
- no quantitative reference
- invalid flow property factor 0
(Minor points)
- duplicate unit name or synonym
- no impact direction defined
- elementary flow is used as input and output
- duplicate product system names
How to obtain and use advice
You can obtain the database here: https://nexus.openlca.org/database/LCA%20Commons%20(complete)
The database is available as one combined database in openLCA Nexus. It has the reference flow system as provided by the original datasets, and comes with its own method package. It should not be used with other databases in openLCA Nexus as the flows will not fit to the other databases and to other LCIA methods as well. A version mapped to the openLCA reference flow system is under preparation.