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Developing guidelines for elementary flow nomenclature
Citation:
Edelen, A. AND W. Ingwersen. Developing guidelines for elementary flow nomenclature. SETAC Europe, Rome, N/A, ITALY, May 13 - 17, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
To provide an overview to a systematic approach to develop a list of elementary flows for use in LCA data.
Description:
In general, a flow in life cycle inventory data refers to an input or output to a process. Flows may be of two broad types: elementary flows or intermediate (known as “technosphere”) flows according to ISO 14044 (ISO 14044 2006). Elementary flows may be defined as materials, energy or space that are used directly from the environment or released directly back into the environment. Life cycle assesment (LCA) data providers are currently not using a common list or system of elementary flows. An early activity within the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative was the creation of a recommended list of flow exchanges by the Data Availability and Data Quality Workgroup (de Beaufort-Langeveld et al. 2003). Elementary flows in all life cycle inventory and life cycle impact assessment sources used in a model must correspond, or match, in order to build a functional LCA model. Edelen et. al. 2017 formulated recommendations on formating and management based on a critical review of elementary flows from eleven LCA sources. These recommendations have been used to categorize flow information into three components and flow metadata into six components. These structured components of flows allows for systematic analysis and structuring of flow components through a knowledge organizational structure (KOS). The ISO 14048 standard was used to structure the different flow and metadata components as exculsive, inclusive or user-defined nomenclatures. The KOS is maintained in a user friendly, publically accessible interface through the US EPA terminology services. This research presentation will focus on describing the benefits of the KOS approach and the tools used to develop the nomenclature system and provide an example application of the KOS to current elementary flow nomenclature.