Country-specific life cycle inventories for human excretion of food products

Do you need to model human excretion as part of an LCA of a food product or diet? 2.-0 LCA consultants provides you with a tool to calculate country-specific life cycle inventories (LCI) for this process in more than 90 countries, thanks to the coupling of the human excretion model by Muñoz et al. (2008) with our tool WW LCI.

Input data to the model by the user is limited to the nutritional composition of food, expressed as its content in water, carbohydrates, protein, fat, phosphorus, and to choose from a drop-down menu the country where food is ingested. The LCI is expressed per kg food item, and it includes toilet use (inputs of tap water, toilet paper, soap), respiration flows (carbon dioxide, water, methane) and the management of human excreta (urine, faeces, tap water, toilet paper, soap) according to the chosen country. The LCI links to ecoinvent data sets and can be imported to the software SimaPro as a .CSV file.

Access to the coupled model is subject to subscription to our Wastewater LCI Initiative. Access to the model by Muñoz et al. (2008) is free by request to ivan.munoz@lca-net.com.

See our publication on this subject in the International Journal of Life Cycle assessment