Adaptation of ecoinvent database to Polish conditions: The case of wood production in the forest

Background, aims and scope This paper is based on the results of a project sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and carried out by the Wood Technology Institute in Poznan, Poland. The main purpose of the project was to assess the environmental impact generated during the entire life cycles of chosen wood products. Most of the data came from the Polish wood industry, but some of it was taken from the ecoinvent database, particularly data relating to forest processes. The data were not used as presented in the database but were properly adapted. The aim of the paper is to show how the ecoinvent’s initial assumptions have been changed and how the data were adapted. The influence of the adaptation on the characterization results is presented as well. Materials and methods The adaptation was performed in several steps: obtaining information about the principal assumptions of the ecoinvent database, gathering data appropriate to Polish conditions, changing the principal assumptions to include the Polish situation, calculating the new allocation and correction factors, forming the new inventory tables for round, industrial, and residual wood (softwood and hardwood), and calculating the characterization results to check the influence of the data adaptation on the life cycle assessment (LCA) final results. The following methods have been used: the economic allocation with the allocation correction to include mass, energy, and carbon dioxide uptake from nature and Ecoindicator99 method to assess the environmental impact. Results The study shows that differences exist between ecoinvent and Polish data for the wood production. Some of the differences are important and significantly impact the final results. The data differ in relation to many factors, for example: tree species, yield of forest, time from planting trees to final harvesting, length and width of forest roads or total area, and land use. The differences in the initial assumptions and further in the allocation factors result in changes of the inventory points and the characterization results. The relevant differences for round hardwood and residual hardwood are not observed. It is not, however, the case of the industrial hardwood where the visible difference exist. The results for all sorts of softwood are completely different and any similarities cannot be observed. Discussion At present, the total area of forest land in Poland is 9.0 million ha. This is equivalent to 28.8% of the cou