Product Impact Factors

Product Impact Factors

• All ecoinvent 3.10 and Agribalyse activities are available on darwin's platform (around 38,000 activities).
• For each product, the 3 types of output data are available: commodity inventory, pressure indicators and impacts indicators.
• Output data can be sorted by Scopes of the value chain (Scope 1 and Scope 3 upstream).
• Pressure and impact indicators can be sorted between the ones resulting from commodities production and the others.
• For pressure and impacts resulting from commodity production, indicators are available for each commodity on the commodity inventory.
• Typically the assessment of one product generates around 5,000 output points.

Commodity explorer: explore supply chains of the products to build commodity inventory

• For each product, we explore LCA database technosphere matrix in order to account for commodities based on the commodity list previously defined.
• We explore up to 3 ranks for Ecoinvent, 7 ranks for Agribalyse.
• Current limit: for Ecoinvent, commodities present at a rank of 4 or higher in the supply chain are not currently captured in the supply chain. This parameter will increase in future versions.

Compute pressures and impacts indicators from LCI

• Computation process:
  • LCA assessments combining LCA database and LCIA model are performed generating all elementary exchanges (LCI) and LCIA midpoints and endpoints.
  • Pressures and impacts indicators are then computed based on pressure and impact models described above.
• Difference between commodities and non commodities products:
  • For products which are not commodities, the commodity inventory is assessed using the commodity explorer process. For each commodity belonging to the commodity inventory pressures and impacts are assessed. Then total pressures and impacts are assessed for the product itself following. Pressures and impacts linked to commodities are finally subtracted in order to at the end get the results with pressures and impacts resulting from commodity on one side and the rest of pressures and impacts on the other side.
  • For commodities, computation of pressures and impacts is straightforward as there are no commodity inventory by construction.
• Granularity of impacts and results associated to commodities is preserved, meaning pressures and impacts associated to commodities are not regrouped. This allows better results analysis and data combination.