EIO-LCA Web Forum

How do you consider the problem of allocation, e.g. by-products that are a part of a certain process to produce a certain commodity? Imagine the sector “iron ore mining” in which mostly iron is won. Sometimes a little bit of copper (that would normally be sector “copper, nickel, lead and zinc mining”) could be extracted (in the form of chalcopyrite that often goes together with iron ores). In IOT: Is the copper (=> the monetary value) from iron ore mining assigned to the sector “iron ore mining” or to the sector “copper, nickel, lead and zinc mining”?

Bodo

Bodo: (updated august 2009)

co-products are inevitably not an issue in these models.

Recall that the data we have is of two kinds - economic and energy/environmental. The economic data is by nature separated into categories and each sector's effects are normalized by their total output in $ (not on a physical unit basis of products). The "product" is $.

On the other side, the energy/environmental data is again at the whole sector level. Existing public data on emissions come from the government and are related to all of the production in the sector (which may make multiple products).

When we say the model represents average production within sectors, this is part of the reason why.