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Interpretation of Sankey diagrams #1392

Answered by marc-vdm
dbantje asked this question in Q&A
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Hi, The Sankey works by calculating an LCA for each visible activity (node) in the graph, scaled to how much of that activity is used by the previous one. This may sound a bit abstract, but I hope the simple example on the Sankey wiki page helps clarify.

As systems can become very large (e.g. ecoinvent has >20000 activities), the graph traversal is cut-off at some amount of steps (250 by default), or when the impact becomes lower than some percentage of the total score (5% by default), whichever comes first.

One explanation for what you are seeing could be that the market for scrap copper also has a negative impact for your impact category that is not shown because one of the cutoff. You …

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@marc-vdm
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