ecoinvent Version 3.7 and 3.7.1

Version 3.7 of the ecoinvent database was published in September 2020. It features more than 900 new and 1,000 updated datasets.

Oct 27th, 2023

It was replaced by ecoinvent v3.7.1 to update a significant error in the iron sinter production dataset. 

With ecoinvent v3.7, the ecoinvent data landscape widens with more than 900 new and 1,000 updated datasets, including more than 100 new products. This update expands the coverage of the database in various sectors such as metals, fertilisers, forestry and wood, packaging materials, waste/recycling, and biogas supply chains, while the electricity market mixes are also updated. 

The updates and additions of version 3.7 come as the result of the ecoinvent association’s participation in various projects and collaborations. These included the overhaul of the Forestry and Wood sector and updates in the metal sector, both sponsored by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, BAFU. Further updates have resulted from collaborations with associations in different industrial sectors globally. Namely, ecoinvent version 3.7 integrates updated data on different metal products from the Cobalt Institute and the Aluminium Association of Canada, and updated data on packaging material from the industry associations Eurosac, CEPI Eurokraft, Pro-Carton, and ECMA European Carton Makers Association. For the fertilisers sector collaborations included those with Yara International ASA and Fertlizers Europe. 

ecoinvent v3.7.1 

To correct iron sinter production dataset, ecoinvent v3.7.1 is released in December 2020. 

ecoinvent v3.7.1 focuses on correcting the iron sinter production dataset. 

With this opportunity, the zinc mining dataset is also updated with newer data submitted by the International Zinc Association after the release of ecoinvent v3.7. This update is expected to significantly improve the quality of the database. The newer data address the high extraction of gold modelled in the dataset until now and affect the results of the database calculated using mineral resource depletion indicators from most methods. Otherwise, thereare further updates or changes of the content of ecoinvent v3.7. 

Please note: Research and projects based on other impact categories, including  climate change, water depletion, cumulative energy demand, land use and land use change, fossil depletion, acidification, eutrophication, ionising radiation, renewable resources, stratospheric ozone depletion, photochemical oxidant formation, radioactive substances and ozone layer depletion, remain completely unaffected by the issue. 

New and Updated Data

Metals 

The Metals sector has been updated with new and updated data on copper, nickel, iron and steel, and scarce metals such as cobalt, rare earths, tungsten, and beryllium. Data contributors included EMPA (sponsored by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, BAFU), the Cobalt Institute and TU Graz. The datasets for aluminium in North America have also been revised with data contributed by the Aluminium Association of Canada. 

Fertilisers 

Data for fertilisers are included in the sectors for Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, and Chemicals. ecoinvent v3.7 includes new and updated data on mineral fertiliser production from Yara International ASA and Fertilizers Europe, submitted in collaboration with Quantis (WFLDB). Further, the markets and market mixes for the fertilisers sector have been generally restructured and updated, separating now the provision of organic and mineral fertilisers for nutrient supply. 

Energy 

ecoinvent version 3.7 also introduces new data on biogas production and supply chains for Switzerland, obtained from a collaboration with Carbotech. Further, attributional electricity market mixes are updated to represent the situation in 2017 for most countries. In the case of US and Canada, the reference year is 2018. Data creation and review was done in collaboration with ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). 

Wood 

Following the release of ecoinvent v3.7, 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. This update was done jointly with Werner Umwelt & Entwicklung and was made possible due to a collaboration with the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (BAFU). 

Paper and Pulp 

Version 3.7 introduces updates in data related to packaging material. Specifically, it includes updated data from the industry associations Pro-Carton, ECMA European Carton Makers Association, Eurosac and CEPI Eurokraft on cartonboard, kraft paper and paper sacks. RISE, Research Institutes of Sweden, made possible the transfer of the data between the associations and ecoinvent. 

Waste Treatment and Recycling 

With version 3.7, 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. This update uses literature data from case studies published by ETH Zurich and Carbotech. 

Building & Construction Materials 

ecoinvent v3.7 includes an updated version of glass wool mat datasets from ISOVER Saint Gobain; the data submission was done by Werner Umwelt & Entwicklung. This branded glass wool mat is now modelled with two alternative adhesives in the database. 

Relevant Documents and Files

Report of Changes

This report covers all changes made in the ecoinvent database between version 3.6 (2019) and version 3.7 (2020). It reflects both the database-wide changes, as well as the sector-specific changes. 

Report of Changes

This automatically generated excel file provides an overview of changes made on the undefined unit process datasets between versions 3.6 and 3.7 of the ecoinvent database. The Report of Changes XLS can be found in the «Files» section of ecoQuery, the online version of the ecoinvent database version 3. It is available to licensees of the ecoinvent database. 

Correspondence File 

The correspondence file is a spreadsheet that lists all datasets in versions 3.6 and 3.7 and matches corresponding datasets between versions. 

Activity Overview for ecoinvent v3.7, Undefined 

An excel file listing all the activities and products present in the ecoinvent version 3.7 database including most of the metadata (geography, ISIC classification, activity type, technology level, product type, unit, etc.). This file also includes a list of all geographies, elementary and intermediate exchanges present in the database. 

Activity Overview for ecoinvent v3.7, APOS 

An excel file listing all the activities present in the ecoinvent version 3.7 database including metadata related specifically to the Allocation at the point of substitution. 

Activity Overview for ecoinvent v3.7, Consequential 

An excel file listing all the activities present in the database including metadata related specifically to the Substitution, consequential, long-term system model. 

Activity Overview for ecoinvent v3.7, Cut-Off 

An excel file which lists all the activities present in the database including metadata related specifically to the Allocation, cut-off by classification system model. 

LCIA Methods in ecoinvent v3.7 

List of all LCIA methods including all the impact categories as well as list of selected LCI cumulative results provided by ecoinvent. 

Known Issues

This section lists all known data errors in version 3.7 of the ecoinvent database. 

Data Issues 

• The activities “electricity voltage transformation from high to medium voltage” and “electricity voltage transformation from medium to low voltage” for the RoW geography appear in the Allocation, cut-off and APOS system model. As the RoW markets for electricity do not exist for these system models, the datasets have LCIA scores of zero and should not be used. 
• The exchange amount of the input from the environment “Tellurium, in ground” (compartment: “natural resource”; subcompartment: “in ground”) in the activity “copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore” for the geographies AU, CA, CL, CN, ID, KZ, RU, US, and ZM was found to be inconsistent with the amount in the GLO geography. The exchange amounts in the local geographies have been scaled down based on the assumption that these geographies extract 70% of the global Te that is extracted in copper ores (modelled in the GLO dataset).The new amounts for the undefined datasets are listed in the table below. They will be available with the release of v3.9. 

Dataset	Unit	Previous Value	New Value
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, AU	kg	2.0062E-04	6.8968E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, CA	kg	2.0062E-04	6.9067E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, CL	kg	2.0062E-04	6.8997E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, CN	kg	2.0062E-04	6.9018E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, ID	kg	2.0062E-04	6.8935E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, KZ	kg	2.0062E-04	6.9096E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, RU	kg	2.0062E-04	6.8960E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, US	kg	2.0062E-04	6.8973E-05
copper mine operation and beneficiation, sulfide ore, ZM	kg	2.0062E-04	6.9021E-05

 

• The activity “treatment of wastewater from grass refinery, capacity 5E9l/year, RoW” is not available in the APOS system model. This does not have any impact on the scores, as the activity and the respective reference product are not used within the database. 
• The dataset “glucose production, RER” has been erroneously excluded from this release. We recommend users to use the dataset “glucose production, GLO” and to adjust the supply chain to refer to RER activities. We will re-introduce it for version 3.8. 
• The dataset “glued laminated timber production, average glue mix, CA-QC” has a wrong reference product, namely “glued laminated timber, for indoor use”. This reference product was renamed in version 3.7 to “glued laminated timber, average glue mix”. In version 3.7, no market for glued “laminated timber, for indoor use” exists. 
• The transport distances in the market for sawnwood, board, softwood, dried (u=10%), planed, CH are incorrect. The exchange transport, freight, light commercial vehicle has to be deleted from the dataset. The exchange “transport, freight, lorry, unspecified” with an amount of 86.7105 metric ton*km has to be added to the dataset. 

• The amount of the reference product “spent sawing slurry from Si-wafer cutting” in the activities “treatment of spent sawing slurry from Si-wafer cutting, RER and GLO” is incorrect. The original single output unit processes can be found at the v2 report (Jungbluth, N., Stucki, M., Frischknecht, R. (2009). Photovoltaics. In Dones, R. (Ed.) et al., Sachbilanzen von Energiesystemen: Grundlagen für den ökologischen Vergleich von Energiesystemen und den Einbezug von Energiesystemen in Ökobilanzen für die Schweiz. Ecoinvent report No. 6-XII). 
• The air freight transport datasets (“transport, freight, aircraft, dedicated freight, […] haul” and “transport, freight, aircraft, belly-freight, […] haul”) are updated within the release of ecoinvent v3.8 in collaboration with INFRAS, the original data provider. An updated project report (Notten P.J., Althaus H-J. and Cox B., (2021) Life cycle inventories of global air freight – Global, Update 2021. ecoinvent Association, Zürich, Switzerland) is accessible in the SRI results section of the ecoinvent website. More information can be found in the Report of Changes for version 3.8. Within the report users can find indication on how to correct the data and information on relevant changes in impact assessment. 
• In the dataset “styrene production”, the benzene emissions to water and to air are too high. With support of PlasticsEurope, it could be established that the benzene emissions to water can be removed completely from the dataset and the benzene emissions to air were decreased to 2.0E-07 kg. A corrected inventory was introduced in version 3.8 
• The datasets “iron sinter production, RER” and “iron sinter production, GLO” have been identified to contain three inconsistently calculated elementary exchanges (emissions) for: 

“Particulates, > 10 um”, 
“Particulates, > 2.5 um, and < 10um” and 
“Dioxins, measured as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin” 

In addition, the datasets lack of emissions for “Particulates, < 2.5 um”. 

The added and corrected elementary exchange/s and their respective amounts are presented in the table below. 

Elementary exchange	Amount	Unit
Particulates, > 10 um	9.38E-05	kg
Particulates, > 2.5 um, and < 10um	1.96E-05	kg
Particulates, < 2.5 um	1.20E-04	kg
Dioxins, measured as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin	1.55E-12	kg

 

• In November 2020, we received an update from the International Zinc Association regarding the modelling of the zinc mining dataset: The exchange amount of the input from the environment “Gold, in ground” (compartment: “natural resource”; subcompartment: “in ground”) was found to be wrong in the activity “zinc mine operation, GLO”. As this is a multi-output activity, several datasets are affected by this error in the attributional system models. The new amounts in each system model, based on corrected data supplied by the data provider, are listed in the table below. These amounts correspond to those published in version 3.7.1 of the ecoinvent database. 
  
  

System model	Reference product	Corrected exchange amount of “Gold, in ground” (kg)
Undefined	zinc concentrate	0.00000104
Allocation, APOS	bulk lead-zinc concentrate	6.86335E-07
Allocation, APOS	copper concentrate, sulfide ore	1.58859E-06
Allocation, APOS	gold, unrefined	0.040384363
Allocation, APOS	iron scrap, unsorted	2.80535E-07
Allocation, APOS	lead concentrate	7.10915E-07
Allocation, APOS	lime	2.21215E-07
Allocation, APOS	quicklime, milled, loose	1.45586E-07
Allocation, APOS	sand	7.56292E-09
Allocation, APOS	zinc concentrate	7.18478E-07
Allocation, cut-off	bulk lead-zinc concentrate	6.88443E-07
Allocation, cut-off	copper concentrate, sulfide ore	1.59347E-06
Allocation, cut-off	gold, unrefined	0.040508371
Allocation, cut-off	lead concentrate	7.13098E-07
Allocation, cut-off	lime	2.21895E-07
Allocation, cut-off	quicklime, milled, loose	1.46033E-07
Allocation, cut-off	sand	7.58615E-09
Allocation, cut-off	zinc concentrate	7.20684E-07
Consequential	zinc concentrate	0.00000104

• The dataset “methylene diphenyl diisocyanate production” (GLO and RER) treats the formed hydrochloric acid as a waste, this does not reflect reality. Hydrochloric acid is a valuable by-product which is used or sold by the MDI producer.The ecoinvent association advices users to either use the LCIA scores from the current ecoProfile available on the PlasticsEurope website or to correct the unit process in ecoinvent by removing the waste neutralisation and treating HCl as a by-product. 
  To correct the ecoinvent dataset, we would advise user to use the undefined dataset available through ecoQuery and remove the exchanges of the input of sodium hydroxide and the outputs of sodium and chloride. 

Consequential System Model Issues 

• Three elementary exchanges are found in the compartment “social”. These exchanges can be ignored, both at the unit process and the inventory level, as ecoinvent does not yet account for social impacts.