Plastic waste account
Relying on the physical flow account for plastic material, openIO now covers generated plastic waste linked to different plastic purchases as well as the average end-of-life of these wastes (landfilled, incinerated, mismanaged, recycled or leaked into the environment). In addition, the impact on biodiversity of leaked plastic waste is characterized in a new impact category called "Physical effect on biota". We rely on the charcterization factors developed by the MariLCA team. More on their work here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2023.138197
Disaggregated GHG
In the v2.8, I was not allowed to use the disaggregated GHG accounts from StatCan and so openIO operated with the aggregated version. Now I have the authorization to once again use the disaggergated accounts. As a result, the impact of climate change on human health and ecosystem quality can once again be quantified. Furthermore, the characterization factors from the IPCC AR6 report are now implemented.
Updated requirements
The Python packages used were beginning to be quite old. So I updated the code to work with newer versions of pandas and numpy. Check the new requirements.txt file