EIO-LCA Web Forum

I am trying to assess the water use associated with different industries involving in manufacturing of wide range of products and services assuming $ 1 billion economic output in each case.

The EIO-LCA model gives me the direct water use by the industry, the electricity use and these same quantities associated with the supply chain.

I also wish to include the stormwater associated with the industries. We do this by multiplying the average annual precipitation and the facility area. But these values are in terms of "gallons per year".

The data from the EIO-LCA model depends on the time duration in which the products or goods were manufactured by that industry which vary from industry to industry.

Is there any way by which the water use data output from the EIO-LCA model can be converted to "per year" terms ? Or convert the stormwater values to equivalent units making them compatible with EIO-LCA output values of water use ?

Is it wrong to assume that in all cases the $ 1 billion economic activity took place in 1 year ?

Thanks.

(updated August 2009)

First off, with respect to water, I assume you are referring to a very old EIO-LCA model (e.g., for US 1992). I dont believe any of the other models have water data. Realize that even that data was from the 1982 census (already 10 years old at the time of the model) and is now of course 25+ years old. It is likely that many things have changed.

That is why we have spent significant time over the past year to try to re-create a database of water use for the 400+ sectors in the 2002 model. It is currently being peer-reviewed.

With respect to your questions about years, what might be useful is to use the entire outputs of sectors (eg $200+ billion for the electricity sector) as an input and then considering the results at that level as per year. Regardless this is a tricky question.