Data and scripts for interoperable and reusable LCA system models of rare earth magnet production

This repository contains the scripts and own generated data developed for the article:

Miranda Xicotencatl, B., Kleijn, R., van Nielen, S., Donati, F., Sprecher B. & Tukker, A. (2023). Data implementation matters: Effect of software choice and LCI database evolution on a comparative LCA study of permanent magnets. Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The data folder contains the characterized results of three alternatives for the production of rare earth magnets (REMs), calculated with several versions of the ecoinvent database (v2.2 and cut-off v3.1 to v3.6), their life cycle inventories, the foreground data to reproduce their product system models and the data plotted in Figures 3, 4 and 5 of the related article.

The file with the Data Underlying the Figures in the Main Article is: dataPlottedInFig_3_4_and_5.xlsx.

The document BWimport in the repository guides the user through the interaction with the custom scripts necessary to reproduce the results of this research. It is available as a PDF and as an interactive Jupyter notebook (IPYNB).

Please refer to the article and the first part of the supplementary information (SI1) for further details about the context and purpose of this repository.

The table below describes the organization of the own generated data for the referred article.

|Name of the file|Location|File format|Software which can read the data| |:----|:----|:----|:----| |processDataCMLCA.xlsx|data/|XLSX|custom script| |CMLCA22REM.txt|data/|TXT|custom script| |00correspondenceFilesNameAndSize.jpg|data/correspondenceFiles|JPG|custom script| |ExpectedOutputfiles.jpg|data/bw-harmonised/|JPG|custom script| |LCIsAsAggregatedProcesses.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REMreplicated22.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REMunlinked22.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REM22.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REM31.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REM32.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REM33.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REM34.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REM35.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |REM36.xlsx|data/bw-harmonised/|XLSX|custom script and brightway2| |brightway2-project-REMaggregatedLCIs-backup.02-February-2022-07-01AM.tar.gz|data/results/|GZ|custom script and brightway2| |softwarebwLCIA-results.csv|data/results/|CSV|text editor| |softwareeditedCMLCALCIA-results.csv|data/results/|CSV|text editor| |versionsCMLLCIA-results.csv|data/results/|CSV|text editor| |Inventorysoftwarebw.csv|data/results/LCIs|CSV|text editor| |InventoryversionsCML.csv|data/results/LCIs|CSV|text editor| |dataPlottedInFig34and5.xlsx|results/plotted|XLSX| Excel or LibreOffice|

Notes on the software which can read the data

• Custom script or Activity Browser: To use the file as intended, please start by opening the file "SI1_BWimport". This document guides the user through the interaction with the custom scripts and it is available as a PDF and as an interactive Jupyter notebook (IPYNB).
• The XLSX, CSV and TXT files intended for the custom scripts can also be browsed in productivity software such as the open-source suite LibreOffice.
• The JPG files in the data folder are used by the interactive Jupyter notebook. Standard processing software is capable to render the JPG files.

Note on foreground data

Sprecher et al. (2014) made their foreground data partially available in a human-readable format under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. The file processDataCMLCA.xlsx is based on their complete product system model and consists of an annotated human- and machine-readable version. This modified version also includes the allocation factors used by Sprecher et al. (2014) that were not reported in their original publication.

License

The data listed in the table above is based on the work by Sprecher et al. (2014) and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License by Brenda Miranda Xicotencatl.

The underlying source code is available in this repository under the MIT license.