Location: US - United States
Stockpiling is a way of assuring provision and control over supplies, and is systematically applied with some commodities by several countries.
The United States has a known and well documented national stockpiling service. Tellurium can be found as one of the commodities that is stockpiled, as it is considered of strategic importance.
This dataset describes the stockpiling of "anode slime, silver and tellurium containing, from refining of primary copper". Only the infrastructure for the storage tank is included by using as a proxy a storage tank for liquid organic chemicals. No losses are taken into account. The stockpiling is considered to happen in the geographical sourroundings of the mine producing the concentrate.
Sources:
-US Department of defense, 2013, Strategic and Critical Materials - Report on Stockpile Requirements.
-Reconfiguration of the National Defense Stockpile Report to Congress, April 2009.
Undefined unit processes (UPRs) are the unlinked, multi-product activity datasets that form the basis for all of the system models available in the ecoinvent database. This is the way the datasets are obtained and entered into the database by the data providers. These activity datasets are useful for investigating the environmental impacts of a specific activity (gate-to-gate), without regard to its upstream or downstream impacts.