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#Used Oil LCA

Used Oil LCA is an online tool to facilitate life cycle assessment of used motor oil in California. The tool also showcases technology developed under the project for the sharing and interactive publication of LCA studies.

Project Origin

In 2009 the California Senate passed a law, known as SB 546, which changed how the state regulated the management of used motor oil. In order to support future policy making, the bill required the state to perform a life cycle assessment of the used oil management system in place. That study was conducted by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in collaboration with a group of industry stakeholders, a panel of critical reviewers, and several consulting firms. The study was overseen by the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle). The study resulted in a number of technical documents available online:

Upon completion in July of 2013, it was desirable for the resulting technical report to be accompanied by an interactive version of the inventory model that was created for the study. However, existing technologies fell short of the agency's requirements for transparency, cost, and ease of use. A new project was conceived to enable the study's results to be published openly and at zero cost to data users and members of the public. That project (DRR-13026) began in September, 2013 and concludes in September, 2015.

Antelope is the nickname of the deliverable software elements and specifications for that project.*

Home View

The Used Oil LCA Home view lists scenarios and LCIA methods .

All users may browse public scenarios. Authorized users may create, update, and delete their own scenarios. If you are an authorized user, the scenario table contains buttons that allow you to perform those operations.

LCIA Methods may be activated and deactivated in the Home view. When you navigate to another view, only active LCIA methods will be shown. This is a local setting and will not affect the selections seen by other users.

Navigation Bar

At the top of the screen is the Navigation Bar, which includes links to all the major features of the tool:

  • Used Oil LCA -- home page
  • Fragment Flows -- Interactive Sankey diagram depicting the inventory model
  • Scenario LCIA Results -- Top-level comparison of LCIA scores for different scenarios
  • Composition Profiles -- Profiles of the trace element composition of different fuels combusted in the model
  • LCIA Comparison -- View and Compare different components of the model under different scenarios.

Information Boxes

Info Boxes

At the far right edge of the navigation bar is a button to toggle the display of Information Boxes on every view. These boxes provide contextual documentation of each element in the app. Click the button to turn on info boxes.

* - Antelope logo by Anastasiya Lazareva