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USEPA / WARMer

Python package to process the USEPA Waste Reduction Model (WARM) to make the data available in tabular and matrix formats.
MIT License
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Provide control over how modeling of forest carbon storage in wood and paper products is implemented #2

Closed WesIngwersen closed 2 years ago

WesIngwersen commented 2 years ago

Background

WARM v15 olca represents carbon storage in wood products like dimensional lumber as a output Carbon/Resource/biotic elementary flow with a negative value, as shown here

image

The method behind this is documented in WARMv15 Background chapters, specifically section 4.4.3, "Changes in in-use product carbon pool"

Issue

The assumption of forest carbon storage in WARM is that with recycling or source reduction of paper and wood products displacing the need, and thus harvest, of forest, and thus more carbon is stored in the forest. This is an induced and indirect effect that could be handled in various ways in LCA, possibly considered or not. Generally in an attributional LCA, it would not be considered -- these kinds of induced effects are reserved for consequential LCA. For WARMer, which is agnostic to modeling assumptions, the current setup does not allow the user with a choice of these assumptions. Therefore WARMer needs to provided options for handling forest carbon storage

bl-young commented 2 years ago

I think this one is more straightforward in that if desired the carbon/resource/biotic can be removed as that flow only applies in these cases. image

bl-young commented 2 years ago

Regarding the implementation of the control, seems like we need to allow for any number of these controls to be applied to a dataset, so perhaps an optional list parameter for get_exchanges(). Each specific control might require a quasi-unique function. Kind of like how things are handled for filters in stewi

bl-young commented 2 years ago

very early implementation started on the controls branch here https://github.com/USEPA/WARMer/commit/b0dd68c4f1f6956804431a4d93ccf3dc0e6a14b7