You are here:
USEPA / Federal-LCA-Commons-Elementary-Flow-List v1.0
Citation:
Ingwersen, W. USEPA / Federal-LCA-Commons-Elementary-Flow-List v1.0. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/C-19/154.
Impact/Purpose:
The fedelemflowlist software provides a standardized and transparent way to generate, and maintain a complete list of elementary flows for use in life cycle assessment data. It supports the Federal LCA Commons by providing a standard elementary flow list for use in LCA data. The 'preferred' flows will become part of a Federal LCA Commons Core database that will be used as a starter database for developed LCA data for publication on the Federal LCA Commons (http://lcacommons.gov/lca-collaboration). v1.0 produced by this version of the software is the first version of the Federal LCA Commons Elementary Flow List. The Federal LCA Commons community, through the github version control, will have the ability to provide edits that can be reviewed and incorporated into future versions of the Flow List.
Description:
fedelemflowlist is a Python package that generates and provides a standardized elementary flow list for use in life cycle assessment (LCA) data as well as mappings to convert data from other sources. This list supports the Federal LCA Commons, where preferred flows from the active version of the flow list produced by this package can be found in formats for use in LCA software. Standard formats for a Flow List and a Flow Mapping are defined and provided by fedelemflowlist. They are implemented as pandas dataframes. Standard formats are also described for the input files used in building the flow list, and implemented as .csv files in the input directory. The version of the package (see Releases) corresponds to the version of the flow list that it provides. The complete or 'master' list contains all valid flows, where the 'preferred' flows are the recommended flows for use in LCA data. fedelemflowlist can export complete or subsets of the flow list and mapping files as a .zip archive of JSON-LD files conforming to the openLCA schema. The background and methodology behind creation of the flow list, as well as a summary of the flow list itself can be found in the USEPA Report 'The Federal LCA Commons Elementary Flow List: Background, Approach, Description and Recommendations for Usage'. The software is available at https://github.com/USEPA/Federal-LCA-Commons-Elementary-Flow-List.
