I am trying to find a way to use the brightway2 framework with ILCD+EPD datasets or the EN 15804 conform environmental product declarations (EPDs), which are also available as CSV (not simapro CSV), to perform LCA calculations for buildings in germany.
One dataset contains information about indicators of the life cycle (e.g. renewable primary energy as energy carrier in MJ) and core environmental impact indicators (i.e. Characterization factors) for the reference flow of one building product (e.g. 1 m^2 parquett). Within one dataset these values are available for 17 life cycle stages defined for building products (product stages, construction stages, use stages, end of life stages). See below for an example.
These datasets are managed and freely available in the ÖKOBAUDAT database.
indicators for life cycle core environmental impact indicators
The difference to the ILCD dataformat is mainly the addition of the life cycle phases and an indication of material properties to convert units if necessary.
Since the datasets already contain the required information for the impact assessment, they only need to be added and multiplied with the right quantities. This means that no new methods are required or that characterization factors = 1 could be used for the "calculation" of the results at the end.
Questions:
1.) Is there a possibility to import datasets in the described form of the ILCD+EPDs or EN 15804 conform CSVs? (which is not included in the online documentation, maybe in development but not yet implemented or a possibility in brightway 2.5?)
2.) Does it make sense to use the brightway framework in terms of computing power, when the activities and exchanges are used to model the inventory graph of a building with its required quantities which then already includes the results?
3.) Are there other possibilities, ideas, suggestions on how bw2 could be used with the described data sets?
I already tried to convert the ILCD+EPD datasets with open source converters to an importable data format for bw2 (ecospold1, ecospold2, simapro CSV) which didn't work.
As far as I understand, the database you mentioned is not a background database (like ecoinvent). It is a database for EPD results, which are pre-calculated LCAs. Which, in my view, is not the purpose of Brightway. It does not make sense to me to use Brightway with ÖKOBAUDAT, nor does it make sense to convert it to any other format or data structure.
