A treatment activity is an Activity dedicated to treating or disposing of materials for treatment, such as wastes or by-products from other activities. Its determining product is negative: the activity is paid to accept materials rather than receiving payment for a product output.
In Life Cycle Assessment, treatment activities are the counterpart to production activities. Whilst production activities generate outputs with positive market or non-market value, treatment activities generate outputs with negative value — the material requiring treatment. The flow of the material is therefore opposite to the flow of the service: the activity receives the material and provides a treatment service in return.
Common examples include landfilling, incineration, wastewater treatment, and composting. Each accepts a specific category of material as its primary input and manages that material's end-of-life in a way that removes it from the product system. In the ecoinvent database, dedicated treatment activities are typically named "treatment of … [name of the material to be treated]."
Treatment activities are linked within product systems through treatment markets, which aggregate treatment capacity from multiple treatment activities and distribute the treatment service to activities generating materials that require disposal. This mirrors how conventional market activities aggregate and distribute products with positive value, but operates in the opposite direction of economic flow.
A transforming activity that takes a material for treatment as an input but has a positive determining product is not classified as a treatment activity. This case is instead called speciality production.
As Chief Operating Officer, Iris leads our organisational development and oversees day-to-day operations. Before joining 2-0, she worked in the biotechnology sector. As an LCA consultant, Iris has devoted her expertise primarily to the domains of sustainable agriculture and food production. She is dedicated to teaching LCA and is responsible for our educational efforts. Iris holds an M.Sc. in Biology – Biotechnology from the University of Copenhagen.
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Glossary terms are clearer once you have seen them applied. Our guide to what LCA is and how it works walks through the complete methodology: goal and scope, inventory modelling, impact assessment, and interpretation.
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