PLEX

Plastic litter extension for the ecoinvent database

About the project

Aim: PLEX is a project to create a plastic litter extension for the ecoinvent database.

Background: Plastic litter gained a lot of attention in the last few years, and it is a bit embarrassing that in LCA, despite its claim to address, in principle, environmental impacts in a holistic manner, plastic litter is neither appearing in the inventory calculations, nor are impacts induced by plastic litter considered. Idea of the project is to create an extension of the popular ecoinvent database so that calculations based on the database provide litter as part of the inventory result.

Method: Litter release rates are based on a probabilistic model presented by Ciroth and Kouame in 2019, and enriched with data from or also used by the plastic leak potential project, and various other sources.

Outcome: The resulting plastic litter extension, PLEX, will be made available in openLCA Nexus.

 

 

 

GreenDelta in the project

This is an internal project of GreenDelta.

Since plastic litter modeling in life cycles is a new area, we are aware that there is a lot to do yet, in inventory and impact assessment modeling, and we are very open for collaboration on this topic. If you are interested – please contact us!