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INFLUENCE OF THE DATASETS CHOICE ON LCA RESULTS: EXAMPLE OF GLUCOSE PRODUCTION
Gerbinet, Saïcha; Belboom, Sandra; Léonard, Angélique
2016FNRS – LCA Contact Group Meeting
 

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Keywords :
LCA; glucose; Database
Abstract :
[en] The aim of this study is to have a good understanding of the environmental impact of glucose production to be able to study material produce from glucose. Glucose is general-ly produced from corn or wheat. Since agricultural processes are known to be difficult to evaluate by LCA, the results obtained with two different LCA databases, Gabi and EcoIn-vent, are compared in this work. The production of glucose from raw materials can be divided in two steps: the agricul-tural step allowing the plant production, and the conversion step including the extraction of the starch from the plant and its hydrolysis into glucose. Preliminary results underline the high impact of the agricultural step, so a special attention has been paid to these data. Specific Belgian data collected by the Walloon Agricultural Research Centre (CRA-W) (2014) [1] have been used as primary data (yield, amount of fertilizers, etc.), either using EcoInvent or Gabi datasets background data to model fertilizers, diesel consumption, etc. A third model was built using only data available in Ecoinvent for corn and wheat cultures. For the conversion step, literature data have been used along with some industrial data. As few studies are available in the literature concerning starch hydrolysis, the focus has been placed on data validation (mass balance checks, cross-reference information, etc.). Based on these multiple sources, it is possible to compare the LCA results for the pro-duction of 1 kg of glucose for three different cases, summarized in the following table. Table 1: Summary of modelled cases Agricultural step Conversion steps Primary data Dataset Primary data Dataset Case 1 Belgian GaBi Literature + Industry GaBi Case 2 Belgian Ecoinvent Literature + Industry Ecoinvent Case 2 Ecoinvent Literature + Industry Ecoinvent The results obtained using these three models will be presented, at both the inventory and impact assessment steps. They show significant differences and highlight the need to understand in depth the involved assumptions when developing the datasets, in addition to the ones adopted for the inventory. These differences in results lead to higher uncer-tainties, allowing only to have a range of possible values as a result. We make the choice to only communicate this range of value and not an absolute value when communicating the results of this study but this leads to some disadvantages such as difficulties in com-parison, etc.
Disciplines :
Chemical engineering
Author, co-author :
Gerbinet, Saïcha ;  Université de Liège > Department of Chemical Engineering > Génie chimique - Procédés et développement durable
Belboom, Sandra ;  Université de Liège > Department of Chemical Engineering > Génie chimique - Procédés et développement durable
Léonard, Angélique  ;  Université de Liège > Department of Chemical Engineering > Génie chimique - Procédés et développement durable
Language :
English
Title :
INFLUENCE OF THE DATASETS CHOICE ON LCA RESULTS: EXAMPLE OF GLUCOSE PRODUCTION
Publication date :
27 October 2016
Event name :
FNRS – LCA Contact Group Meeting
Event place :
Bruxelles, Belgium
Event date :
le 27 octobre 2016
Available on ORBi :
since 15 May 2017

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