Proxies for water and nitrogen demands. Meanwhile, consistency in determining water proxy values in the ecoinvent datasets has been improved. In the ecoinvent database v2, technical water inputs have sometimes been estimated as 50 % of the proxy cooling water inputs (e.g. ethyl benzene production ( )), at some other times as 25 % of the proxy cooling water inputs (e.g. dimethyl ether production ), or at other times have been neglected completely (e.g. boric oxide production ). The reasoning for choosing either of these approaches remains unclear, but the implementation appears to depend somewhat on the authors. Technical water inputs of 25 to 50 % of the cooling water inputs appear high in comparison to the literature examples and the share in the IDEA database (about 3 % of the cooling water inputs), which has been derived from the empirical Japanese input-output mass balance data . In the updated ecoinvent v3 approach, technical water proxy inputs are derived from the amount of Gendorf water inputs that are neither cooling nor tap water . This leads to much lower technical water inputs compared to the earlier approaches, and is at about 10 % of the cooling water inputs.