Regioinvent: a regionalized version of ecoinvent integrating detailed trade data

Life cycle inventory databases currently offer limited country-level coverage and often rely on outdated supply chain representations in their market processes. In this research, we combine ecoinvent with the BACI database—which provides detailed international trade statistics—to regionalize ecoinvent and model average supply chains based on up-to-date data. To achieve this, we automatically duplicate regional processes and adapt them to specific national contexts by modifying three key inputs in the ecoinvent database: electricity, heat, and municipal solid waste treatment. We also construct national consumption markets based on international trade and domestic production data to capture country-specific supply chain characteristics. These markets are fully relinked throughout the database, and elementary flows are spatialized. The resulting regioinvent adaptation of ecoinvent comprises 4,031 products regionalized across 225 countries, yielding 669,571 newly created processes. We assess the effect of regionalization by comparing each regionalized process with its corresponding original ecoinvent process. On average, regionalization introduces differences of 10.8% for climate change, 13.9% for human health, and 11.6% for ecosystem quality. Spatialization of elementary flows is found to exert a stronger influence on regionalized impact categories than inventory regionalization alone. Future developments of regioinvent will focus on addressing its current limitations, particularly the estimation of domestic production data and the contextualization of transportation within national consumption markets. Despite these limitations, we recommend that LCA practitioners use regioinvent, as it is expected to provide more accurate results than the traditional ecoinvent database.