Tutorials

Contents

• General
  • Your first LCA

General

Your first LCA

What will you learn

With this tutorial, you will learn the general steps to complete an LCA in Activity Browser.

We will create a simple product-system that produces electricity from coal and calculate the climate change and water use impact.

Before you start

Important

Make sure you have/know the following:

• Have a working installation of Activity Browser
• Have a project set up
• Know the basics of LCA

1. Create a new database

• Create new database with the name 'first lca tutorial', confirm.

2. Create the system

2.1 Creating activities

To assess the environmental impact of generating electricity from coal, we need to model the production of electricity and coal first.

• Right-click on your new database in the Databases table and choose New activity.

• Name your new activity 'electricity production, coal', confirm.

This opens your new activity in the Activity Details tab on the right. This tab shows all information about an activity. You can also see your new activity in the database on the left now.

Tip

You can only edit activities when the database is not set to Read-only and the activity is set to Edit Activity. You can set these in the Databases table and in the top left of the Activity Details tab respectively. This is done to avoid accidental changes.

Your changes are saved automatically.

• In the Products table, change the Product name to 'electricity' and Unit to 'kilowatt hour'.
• Optionally set the Location to your favourite country.

Note

Units in Brightway and Activity Browser are 'just' text. Units don't have an inherent meaning or relationships to each other.

2.2 Linking activities

• In the Databases table in the Project tab on the left, open the database 'biosphere3' by double-clicking on it.

Note

All databases that you have open in a project are shown as tabs underneath the Databases table.

• Search for 'carbon dioxide, fossil' in the database, the category does not matter right now.
• In the Activity Details show the (still empty) Biosphere Flows table by ticking the box.
• Drag the one of the 'carbon dioxide, fossil' biosphere flows to the Biosphere Flows table.
• Set the Amount to 0.9 kilogram by double-clicking on the Amount field and changing the value.

Tip

You can resize the tables in the activity details by dragging the 'splitter' up or down.

2.3 Finishing your system

Of course, electricity cannot be generated from nothing, so we need to add the production of coal as a new activity to the system.

• Create a new activity named 'coal mining' with as Product name 'coal' and as Unit 'kilogram'.
• Again add the 'carbon dioxide, fossil' biosphere flow to the activity, set the Amount to 0.15 kilogram.
• Now switch back to the Activity Details of the process 'electricity production, coal'.
• From the database 'first lca tutorial' add the 'coal mining' activity you just created to the Technosphere Flows table of the electricity production process.
• Set the Amount to 0.4 kilogram

Now, the mining of coal also takes some electricity, so we need to go back to the coal mining process and also add electricity as input there

• Open the 'coal mining' activity again and add 'electricity production' to the process
• Set the Amount to 0.01 kilowatt hour.

2.4 Inspecting your system

You have now finished creating a simple product-system for producing electricity from coal. You may want to inspect if everything in developing your system went correctly.

In addition to the input flows from the technosphere and the biosphere, you can also see the Downstream Consumers, which are activities that consume the product your process produces.

You can also look at the supply chain network visually with the Graph Explorer. You can open the graph explorer in two ways; 1) by right-clicking on an activity in a database and choosing Open activity in Graph Explorer, or 2) in the top left of the Activity Details, by clicking the Graph Explorer logo.

3 Creating a calculation setup

Now that we created a product-system, we can calculate its environmental impact.

• On the right, open the tab LCA setup and click New, name your calculation setup 'first calculation setup'.
• On the left, find your activity 'electricity production' in your database and drag it to the Reference flows table.
• On the left, open the tab Impact Categories and search for 'GWP100' and choose one of the impact categories, drag it to the Impact categories table.

4 Running an LCA calculation

Now you are ready to calculate results.

• Click the Calculate button on the top left of the LCA Setup tab.

When Activity Browser finished the calculation, it will automatically open the LCA results tab on the right.

• Congratulations! You have successfully calculated your first LCA.

Note

The activities you see in there Reference flows table are linked to your system, if you change your system, the changes are saved automatically. Do keep in mind that you do need to re-calculate your results every time you make changes.