Coming soon: ecoinvent version 3.11

Some of the key highlights of this update include:

• Fuels: New consumption mixes for crude petroleum oil and natural gas (2023 data) and updated coal supply chains, including methane emissions from mining and improved regionalization of consumption mixes (2022 data).

• Electricity: Revised mixes using statistics from 2021 and 2022.

• Chemicals: Updates for vinyl chloride, PVC, and other resins; new data for several precursors and composites.

• Waste: New data on plastic recycling in Europe, the UK, and China; regionalized data for the treatment of municipal waste in Europe.

• Batteries: Two new Li-ion chemistries, Na-ion electrolytes, and enhanced data on graphite and battery components.

• Metals: Updated metal prices, new data for electrical steel, and updated data for gallium.

• Other Sectors: New agricultural data for Switzerland, cement data for Canada, new and updated paper packaging products in Europe, and an updated composition of the passenger-car circulating fleet.

Stay tuned for more detailed information on these updates with the official release in November!

We want to inform you of two significant issues identified in version 3.10 of the ecoinvent database, which affect certain impact assessment indicators across all system models.

• Coke Production Emissions (China and Rest-of-World): The first issue involves incorrect emissions values for two unit processes that model coke production. Emissions of “Cobalt II” and “Anthracene” are significantly overestimated, leading to inflated impact scores for indicators related to ecotoxicity, human toxicity, and human health. This affects a substantial part of the database due to the widespread use of coke in product supply chains. However, indicators outside of these specific impact categories remain unaffected.

• Brazilian Electricity Market Production Volumes: The second issue pertains to production volumes in Brazilian electricity markets, where the volumes are three orders of magnitude too small. This underestimates the contribution of Brazilian markets to the Latin American market groups (RLA), which particularly impacts biogenic climate change and climate change related to land use. Only a small number of datasets (less than 0.5%) are affected, though the impact is noticeable in RLA market groups and around ten additional datasets.

To address these issues, we will release version 3.10.1 to provide fixes for users of version 3.10. This intermediate version will be made available concurrently with version 3.11 at the beginning of November.

If you are not using ecoinvent version 3.10, your work is not affected by these two issues.

For detailed information, users can refer to the Known Issues section of the version 3.10 article on our Knowledge Base.