Anecdotally, my team understands that OneClick A1-A5 and A-C embodied carbon results tend to be notably lower than those from eTool and a couple other tools. We have our suspicions about why – all probably driven by a positive bias towards OneClick .
We’ve not been able to look in-depth at models of identical buildings which have been done in multiple tools, so it’s hard to troubleshoot this.
I think I have seen others observe something similar, but I can’t recall where I read this.
Anyways, putting the question here: Is anyone aware of any studies into why one LCA tool might trend higher or lower than others?
Perhaps you could ellaborate your suspicions please? I would love to hear how you have compared these so far? eTool for example has no EPD data in it and some travel distance suggestions might not be the same depeding where you are in the world as OCL have localised ones and in addition we OCL has loclisation for manufacturing energy grids. Looking forward your reply.
“Suspicions” is a word with negative meaning perhaps. But in this case, we think that OneClick’s larger database, and more control over the whole range of LCA inputs means that it’s results are capable of being more detailed. Also, features like localisation can also adjust better to regions.
But as I say, we don’t have models which were done in multiple software packages in order to investigate and definitively say one way or the other.
Its very simple, they use different data. functionality, calculation and granularity are exactly the same (basically mandated by EN15978 RICs etc). But the background datasets used are different, different approach to regionalisation, different version of Ecoinvent, different allocation methods etc. a good comparison is below
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