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FLOWSA

FLOWSA is a Python package designed to streamline attributing environmental, economic, emissions, waste, material, and other data to economic sectors. Data can be attributed to sectors that produce the data or sectors that consume the data. In this way, the direct flows of data between economic sectors can be captured. For example, we can capture the movement of water from public supply withdrawals (SectorProducedBy) to domestic use (SectorConsumedBy). Resource data are generally attributed to 2-6 digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Codes. The economic sector data has been extended to include unofficial 7-digit sector codes when the official 6-digit codes are not detailed enough. These codes can be aggregated to official NAICS codes. FLOWSA also allows users to append material codes to allow material tracking.

• See the Census of Agriculture activity to sector mapping file for example 7-digit sector codes for crops or the Wasted Food Report for example waste-management 7-digit codes.
• See the FLOWSA FBS datasets developed in the USEPA Hybrid Input-Output (HIO) GitHub repository for example material flow tracking.

FLOWSA is one tool within the USEPA's collection of open-source tools in the realm of industrial ecology.

Users can access the most recent datasets output from FLOWSA via a remote storage option.

Project Objectives

FLOWSA has two objectives:

1. Import environmental (and other types of) data from publicly available datasets, formatting the data into a standardized table, a Flow-By-Activity dataset. Flow-By-Activity datasets are largely unchanged from the original data source, with the exception of formatting. Data that are currently available in the Flow-By-Activity format are listed here. See Creating a Flow-By-Activity Dataset for details on methodology.

2. Attribute resource use, waste, emissions, and loss to economic sectors, generally 2-6 digit NAICS Codes, formatting the data into a standardized Flow-By-Sector table. These new datasets are generally created using multiple Flow-By-Activity datasets. A list of available Flow-By-Sector datasets can be found here, with a more detailed explanation of methodology found in Creating a Flow-By-Sector Dataset.

   • Flow-By-Sector example: The main data source for creating a "Water" Flow-By-Sector table is the USGS, which publishes national water withdrawal information for nine broad categories. One of these categories is "Irrigation Crop", which can only be mapped to 3-digit NAICS ('111' and '112'). To reach the objective of mapping water withdrawal information to 6-digit NAICS, additional Flow-By-Activity datasets are called on for allocation purposes. In the case of "Irrigation Crop," acreage by crop type and water application rates (gal/acre) by crop type are multiplied to calculate water use by crop type at the 6-digit NAICS. A ratio is calculated for the quantity of water used by a crop out of the total water use calculated using the USDA datasets. This ratio is then multiplied by the USGS water withdrawal information for "Irrigation Crop," allocating the 3-digit NAICS to 6-digits.
     • Acreage information is published in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Census of Agriculture (CoA) and water application rates are published in the USDA Irrigation and Water Management Survey (IWMS).

Projects Using FLOWSA Output

1. FlowBySector datasets are used in the USEEIO modeling efforts, where the NAICS are mapped to BEA sector codes and transformed into satellite tables for the purposes of environmentally-extended input-output modeling.
2. The USEPA developed prototype Hybrid Input-Output Models to assess the direct and embedded environmental and economic impacts of waste management pathways for individual waste materials.