Manufacturing and Disposal of Building Materials and Inventorying Infrastructure in ecoinvent (8 pp)

Goal, Scope and Background. The present paper describes the goal and scope of building material inventories in the ecoinvent database and gives an overview of its content. The ecoinvent database provides generic life cycle inventories for building material production and related processing. They can be used as background data for different LCA applications. Their geographical and temporal scope is Switzerland or Europe and the year 2000. Methods. Data is inventoried as unit processes. Consistency throughout different sources is heeded by systematically estimating missing data. Infrastructure is consequently considered. Different disposal options are modelled. Results and Conclusion. The ecoinvent data provide a harmonised basis for different kinds of building materials. Even though not all datasets could be established on the same quality level, the results generally are believed to be comparable. Since data are generic, they are, however, not suitable to directly compare specific products. Disposal is relevant for the environmental burdens of uses of building materials. Complete life cycles have to be assessed. For this purpose, cumulative energy demand (CED) is not a suitable indicator. Recommendation and Perspective. In future versions of ecoinvent, data quality could be further improved. The database should be extended to include further building materials from secondary materials. To do so, the methodological treatment of secondary materials needs special attention.