EIO-LCA Web Forum

Hello,

If I wanted to determine the life-cycle water-use impacts of consumer expenditures on beef (for example), should I sum the impacts of the two IO categories for (1) Cattle Ranching and Farming and (2) Animal (except poultry) slaughtering and processing? Or would this be double counting? In other words, what are the system boundaries and inclusions for animal slaughtering? I assume it does not include the cattle ranching since that is its own IO category?

Also, after converting from consumer expenditures to producer prices (using BEA markups), how can I allocate the fraction of the money that would go to the cattle ranching sector versus the animal slaughtering sector, if the known monetary value is final expenditures on beef?

Thank you.

Ecohen:

No, the whole point of a supply chain based model (like EIO-LCA) is that it by default includes all the upstream supply chain effects.

Thus if you run the model for beef production, it automatically includes the grazing/raising of the cattle. you can see the results of that row's activity in the results. Thus, to find the water use related to grain production, grazing, and slaughtering just look in each of those rows in the results.

Also note that based on your data, you might want to be using the purchaser price model (in which you could input the raw dollars of consumer expenditures for your sector of interest).

I see what you mean now regarding the upstream inclusions; thank you for the clarification. On your second point, I agree that using the Purchaser Price Model would be preferable since I have consumer expenditure data, but [i]water use[/i] is not included in the 2002 or 1997 Purchaser Price Model--as far as I can tell when I run the tool. Perhaps this will be added soon?

Thanks,
Elliot

Sorry for misunderstanding part of your question. We have no plans for updating water data for 1997 - there are no relevant data sources.

The lack of water data in the 2002 purchaser model is an oversight. We will fix that ASAP!

Water vector has been posted for the 2002 purchaser model! Thanks for pointing this out, Elliot.