Environmental Life Cycle

Assessment
CEE 12-714 / EPP 19-714

Lecture 8: Process-based Life Cycle Inventory,

SimaPro Introduction
February 12 and 14, 2018
Administrivia
• HW3 due Thursday Feb 22, midnight
 You should be able to do all of the questions after
today’s lecture
• Group Project draft Goal and Scope due
Monday, Feb 26, midnight
 Teams should be meeting
 We can meet to discuss as you like

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 Group project
3
• Choose an existing or proposed product system
• Specify all study design parameters
• Conduct a full life cycle assessment
 Goal and scope
 Inventory
 Impact
 Interpretation
• Compare your results to any similar analyses in the
literature
• Team presentation (last 2 days of class)
• Written group project report due during Finals Week.

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 Administrivia
4

• Trouble accessing SimaPro? GO TO OFFICE

HOURS!
• SimaPro access instructions on Canvas
 Ensure you can successfully open the software
• Questions from Monday?

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Course trajectory
1. Introductions 10. Uncertainty
2. Life cycle thinking 11. Input-output LCA
3. Quantitative methods and 12. Process-matrix LCA
life cycle cost analysis
13. Hybrid LCA
4. ISO LCA framework
14. Impact assessment
5. Critical review
15. Structural path analysis
6. LCA data sources
16. Professional responsibility
7. Life cycle inventory
17. Carbon footprinting
8. SimaPro
18. LCA for big decisions
9. Handling multifunction
19. Project presentations
systems

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 ISO 14040: Figure 1

Phases of an LCA
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• Goal and scope

definition

• Inventory

• Impact assessment

• Interpretation

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 RECAP: Music Delivery Case Study
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• 15 years ago CMU approached by large

software company to study energy and CO2
impacts of downloading music
• Goal: Compare methods of delivering music to
consumers
 CDs vs. downloads
 Additional distinction for CDs: buy at retail store or
online

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RECAP: CO2 impacts

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 Discussion
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• Dematerialization increases environmental

performance but partially offset by internet energy
use

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 Discussion
• Sensitivity — what parameters could flip result
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 Retail with zero customer transport emissions

(bicycle/walk)
 5 hours of web browsing for online shopping
 260 MB data transfer (lossless files)

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 Discussion
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• Suggested future work:

 Customer usage patterns: are they different?
 Other types of online music: single songs, subscription
 Energy use of streaming audio/video — large upstream
data transfer

?
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 Similar study on buying physical
goods
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• Buying things online versus in retail stores

 http://www.ce.cmu.edu/~greendesign/research/Buy_co
m_report_final_030209.pdf

• Also, one of last year’s Group Projects explored

grocery shopping options for CMU students
 Brick and mortar stores
 Delivery
 Local transport options

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SimaPro

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 Overview of SimaPro
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• Software tool to support conduct of LCA

• Our goal today
 Get oriented in SimaPro
 Show a few details about building LCAs
• Can do much more…
 If you want to know more…work through
wizards/demos
• Developed by Pre Consultants in the
Netherlands

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 How to access SimaPro
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1. If you don’t already have it, download the VMware Horizon Client (for
Virtual Andrew) from https://www.cmu.edu/computing/software/all/vmware-
view/index.html
2. Follow the instructions for your operating system (e.g., Windows) from
https://www.cmu.edu/computing/services/endpoint/software/managed-
desktops/how-to/virtual-andrew.html
3. Log into virtual Andrew
4. Go to virtual.andrew.cmu.edu server
5. Login with your CMU login ID and password
6. Open SimaPro 8.4 (available on the server)
7. Click on “servers” from the “Open database” window, then select “new
server” and enter simaprodb.andrew.local.cmu.edu
8. Click “close”
9. Choose PROFESSIONAL from the “Open database window”
10. Your SimaPro login ID and password are both set with your CMU ID. Feel
free to change your password
11. Open a “new” project to get started See Canvas for more
details and screenshots 30
 SimaPro access…
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• HW3, Question 4 asks you to use SimaPro to

examine an ecoinvent process for concrete
 You can use ecoinvent directly to answer this question
if SimaPro is not available to you for some
reason…
 https://www.ecoinvent.org/database/how-to-use-
ecoinvent-3-online/how-to-use-ecoinvent-3-online.html
 Sign in as a guest user.

 BETTER OUTCOME: get help from TAs to access

SimaPro!

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 SimaPro LCA Explorer
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• After logging in and opening a

“new project”, the lefthand
navigation bar tracks the
phases of an LCA

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 Wizards
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Excellent Guided Tour (with Coffee)

in Demo version of SimaPro
Worth making time to run this tour

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 Goal and scope/Descriptions
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Mostly empty
text boxes that
LCA
Practitioner
completes
during study

You might use

this during
your project

Not required

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Goal and scope/Libraries

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Goal and scope/Libraries

Now, focus
on a data
source we
already
know –
USLCI
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 Inventory/Processes
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After selecting the USLCI

library, navigate through
Processes tree to the
familiar “Electricity,
bituminous coal, at power
plant/US”

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 Inventory/Processes
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Select “View” to see

the unit process details

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 Partial snip,
but should
Inventory/Process View look familiar

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 Inventory/Processes
• Extensive SimaPro libraries and sub-databases
can be overwhelming (and slow)
• For now, limit your libraries:
 Ecoinvent 3 – allocation, default – unit
 USLCI

We’ll branch out to

other libraries as
we go…

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Just by adding one database…

Now we have 78 processes (just 3 from USLCI)…

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Details: Market versus Transformation?

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Details: Market versus Transformation?
• Transforming activities
• Human activities that transform inputs so that the output of
the activity is different from the inputs
• a hard coal mine that transforms hard coal in ground to the
marketable product hard coal
• We will focus on these types of modules primarily
• Market activities
• Transfer transformed outputs to the transforming activities
that consume it as an input
• From hard coal at the supplier to hard coal at the consumer
• Consumption mix
• Production-volume-weighted averages of the suppliers to a
specific market
• You may need these modules in your projects, but not for
homework assignments

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Details: Market versus Transformation?

• Note that USLCI does not

differentiate between “market”
and “transformation”
• The 3 USLCI electricity from coal
processes are under the higher
level category, “Coal”

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 General Naming Convention
ecoinvent/SimaPro data
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• Product {Region} | Process name | Database

version, Unit (U) versus System (S) process
 Electricity, high voltage {FRCC}| electricity production,
hard coal | Alloc Def, U
• 3 Model versions
 Allocation, default (our default for now)
 Allocation, recycled content More on these in a later
 Consequential lecture – support more
sophisticated analyses than
we need

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Unit (U) and System (S) processes
• All 3 models available as unit or system processes
• Unit (U) processes contain links to other unit processes, from
which inventory flows can be calculated by SimaPro
 Support detailed interpretation and uncertainty analysis
 Slower SimaPro processing
 Electricity, high voltage {FRCC}| electricity production, hard coal |
Alloc Def, U
 Inputs include 7 processes for NOx and SOx treatment, water, light fuel oil,
the power plant itself, and coal

• System (S) processes contain the already calculated

inventory flows and do not contain links to other processes
 Built in roll up of all upstream processes
 Inputs are “from nature” and processes are not visible
 Faster SimaPro processing
 Electricity, high voltage {FRCC}| electricity production, hard coal |
Alloc Def, S

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Details: Geography acronyms?

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Details: Geography acronyms?

• ASCC = Alaska Systems Coordinating Council

• AT = Austria
• BE = Belgium
• RER = Europe
• RoW = Rest of World
• US = United States
• RFC = Reliability First Corporation (our “regional
entity” controlling our grid)
• See Figure 5-11 in LCA textbook
• See ecoinvent geography spreadsheet (Canvas)
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Homework 3 hint!
• HW3.Q4. In the SimaPro software, find the
ecoinvent system process to produce “concrete,
normal {CH} | production | Alloc Def, S”.
• Our current version of SimaPro does not give
this process exactly.
 Find the process that comes closest to it.
 It will be MORE descriptive than this older version.
• Select the appropriate library first
• Use the Process outline to find the Concrete
category
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Backing out of the weeds to
other SimaPro features…

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Impact Assessment/Methods
• Make sure the Library for
“Methods” is activated

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Impact Assessment/Methods
• We will return to Impact
Assessment later in the course

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 Fill-in-the-blank for the practitioner
as the LCA develops – we won’t
Interpretation use this

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General data
• Nice go-to place for references, CAS numbers,
conversion factors, cute images…

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 Some Caveats
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• SimaPro / ecoinvent data:

 Come from around the world. Assess its validity for
your purposes
 Come from different years. Technology changes, so
that might affect its usefulness
 Study boundaries often different

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 SimaPro in rest of course
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• We won’t explicitly require it for your projects

modeling but feel free to use it
• Allows for more complex products than USLCI
(fewer “cutoffs”)

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Next …
• Begin talking about multifunction systems and
how to handle them in LCA
• Read Chapter 6 in LCA Textbook as directed
• Regular office hours
• HW3 due Feb 22
• Group project draft Goal and Scope due Feb 26

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