Proceedings of the 27th International Multiconference INFORMATION SOCIETY – IS 2024, October, Ljubljana, Slovenia .
ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: Not available at this time.
Abstract: Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been established as the standard method for evaluating environmental impacts of products, and processes. However, ISO standards depicting the application of these standards are tailored more towards LCA practitioners and less on the data acquisition and quality. The data acquisition process is not very robust, and considerable decision making and quality control is entrusted to the practitioners. Taking the lack of incentives from industry participants to submit quality data, the integrity of LCA databases can be questionable. Moreover, in some cases, participants may be incentivised to protect their data from competition. To address these concerns, data is carefully studied by external experts to verify their credibility. However, it is not entirely clear how these experts are chosen, nor how trust is established. In this paper, we apply a well known method Law of anomalous numbers, commonly refereed to as Benford’s law in order to test the conformity of commonly used LCA databases. Our results on testing Ecoinvent, one of the most widely used LCA databases, show that LCA data strongly conforms to Benford’s law. Moreover, our analysis includes 5 additional publicly available LCA databases, which also conformed with the exception of Bioenergiedat, which is likely due to the low number of observations. Finally, we tested individual properties given by Ecoinvent and establish that very few columns (<5%), which pass the criteria for Benford’s analysis are non-conforming. Although interesting, these results call for a more fine-grained analysis as future work.
Bibtex:
@inproceedings{,
AUTHOR={Bogdan Šinik and Aleksandar Tošić },
TITLE= { LCA data conforms to Benford’s law},
BOOKTITLE={Proceedings of the 27th International Multiconference
INFORMATION SOCIETY – IS 2024},
ADDRESS={Ljubljana, Slovenia},
MONTH={October},
YEAR={2024},
URL={https://is.ijs.si/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/IS2024_-_Environment_paper_1.pdf},
}
Reference Type: Conference Paper
Subject Area(s): Computer Science