LCA tool for plastics converters in Denmark (Plastberegner) – Documentation
Schmidt J (2012)
Publication info
Plastindustrien, Copenhagen.
Introduction
In 2010 the Danish Plastics Federation (Plastindustrien) initiated the development of a web-based tool that enabled their members to produce life cycle environmental information on their products. The members of the Danish Plastics Federation are plastics processing companies in Denmark.
The tool was available via a webpage www.plastberegner.dk (no longer available). To access the tool, it was required to register and to create an account as the tool saved all information entered by the user.
In the tool it was possible to create own LCA activities and to link to activities in a database. The database contained pre-calculated life cycle emissions for a large number of LCA activities, e.g. electricity, transport, raw materials etc. It was not possible to modify the data in the database. Data were maintained by the tool administrator. The processes created by the user could be linked to other processes created by the user as well as to processes in the database.
The LCA activities in the database were stored as so-called terminated processes. This meant that the database did not contain information on intermediate product transactions between processes – only the calculated life cycle emissions were stored in the database. The reason for this was that the calculation speed would become slower if the database contained more than e.g. 4000 linked activities that would have to be re-calculated (matrix inversion) for each calculation by the tool.
The report documents all life cycle inventory data that were available in the database, and how the life cycle results were calculated, i.e. how the user specific linked LCA activities were combined with processes in the database.