Developments in Wood and Packaging Materials Life Cycle Inventories in ecoinvent (9 pp)

Goal, Scope and Background This paper gives an overview on how the wood and packaging material production is inventoried in ecoinvent. Packaging materials have been a very important topic in the area of Life Cycle Assessment for more than twenty years. Wood is the most important renewable material and regenerative fuel used worldwide, and an important raw material for paper / board. Several methodological problems arising when inventorying wood for material and energetic uses in a generic database are discussed in more detail. Within the ecoinvent project, the Swiss data base for life cycle inventory data, two reports are dedicated to these two important topics – report No. 9 for wood and report No. 11 for packaging materials. Methods The whole wood chain has been modeled in a consistent way. This allows one to use this data for LCAs of building materials, bioenergy or paper production. The data represent average technologies used in Central Europe in the year 2000. A revenue-based co-product allocation approach is used for the different outputs. Correction factors are introduced for the consistent modeling of mass-based, material inherent wood properties such as solar energy, carbon uptake and land use. For packaging materials, the datasets represent European average data for the most often used materials as well as specific datasets for the production of actual packaging boxes and containers.Results and Discussion For wood, revenue-based allocation and the use of the correction factors for mass-related wood properties are shown and explained. For packaging materials, the importance of the raw material wood to the total load is shown. Furthermore trends in the data inventories for board packaging materials over the last two decades are discussed: mainly due to the increased comprehensiveness of the data, higher cumulative emissions can be observed. Conclusion For wood, the database ecoinvent provides consistent datasets for the entire chain from forestry to intermediate products such as timber, different types of wood-based boards, chips, pellets, etc. For packaging materials, the number of datasets of basic materials has been extended. A modular concept for actual packaging container datasets allows the user an easy modeling of various types of packaging containers/boxes. In the area of paper and board, a comprehensive database for the production of various types of pulp, paper and board is provided, which is representative for the average European production situation. Outlook Since wood is only limited and representative data for Europe is therefore not included, an update in the near future would be reasonable. Possible further extensions in the future could include various, final wooden products. For the data on paper/board, different levels of quality are observed, requiring a selective up-date of these data. Future extensions could include datasets for the import of pulp from overseas – especially from South America and Canada.