In a context of mobility electrification, the number of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries is increasing rapidly. As Li-ion batteries depend on a variety of critical and strategical materials, it is essential to assess their environmental impacts. The literature has shown that there is a significant heterogeneity in the methods, software, indicators, functional units, scope, data used and...
Green hydrogen technologies have emerged as promising technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Produced using renewable energy through water electrolysis, green hydrogen offers a carbon-free alternative for sectors like heavy industry and long-haul transport, and enhances energy system resilience by storing green electricity chemically. As an increasing number of technologies for...
This abstract is an essential description of the work going on within the "Evaluation of policies for enhancing sustainable wheat production in Italy"
(ECOWHEATALY) research project. The ECOWHEATALY project focuses on the power of policies in providing economic incentives for farms switching from less to more sustainable wheat production techniques.
To address real-world complexity,...
Rising environmental pressure from anthropogenic systems asserts the need to evaluate anthropogenic systems designs in terms of environmental sustainability. Absolute environmental sustainability assessment enables such an evaluation by comparing the anthropogenic system’s environmental impacts against system-specific thresholds for environmental sustainability. However, this approach depends...
Semiconductors are essential to the development of information and communication technologies (ICT). This industry is characterized by rapid innovation and industrial secrecy, with state-of-the-art manufacturing processes kept confidential and proprietary. From an environmental perspective, the semiconductor industry is also a resource- and energy-intensive sector, with a significant footprint...
Mitigating climate change requires the development of new chemical processes (Shukla et al., 2022). Confirming their climate benefits requires life cycle assessment (LCA). Still, in practice, LCAs of chemical processes are often conducted by manually extracting data from process simulation software and transferring it to LCA tools (Köck et al., 2023). This manual approach is time-consuming,...
In sustainability research, and especially in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), practitioners face two recurring challenges when working with chemical products in inventories:
- Finding the exact chemical – Large datasets such as ecoinvent contain inconsistent naming, multiple synonyms, and sometimes missing identifiers, making it difficult to locate the right entry.
- Finding a suitable...
The accuracy and reliability of LCA results heavily depend on LCA databases. However, missing data and the cumbersome process of searching and comparing datasets makes LCA modelling manual inefficient, and error prone. The project aims to integrate Graph Retrieval-augmented Generation (GraphRAG) with Ecoinvent to make inventory search process simpler, and reliable. Retrieval-Augmented...
LCA is already hard enough and our tools are sometimes a challenge to use. What can OpenLCA and Activity Browser learn from each other and what should we both improve? We want to learn from our users, so come and discuss with us!
In this talk, we present a project that transforms automatically a parametric inventory, built with lca_algebraic, into an interactive web application, ready to be published.
Traditional Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods assign characterization factors (CFs) uniformly to flows (nodes), neglecting the contextual richness of each exchange in a product system. In this session, we introduce edges, an open-source Python library that expands the Brightway2/25 LCA framework by shifting impact characterization from nodes to edges—the exchanges between...
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an iterative process per se. However, most tools today used by LCA practitioners require using multiple applications and migrate data between tools to successfully draw conclusions of an environmental assessment. Life cycle impact assessment scores (LCIA Scores) is a tool designed to simplify and improve LCA workflows for non-experienced practitioners, with a...
The e-Hydrogen Cost Optimizer is a Python-based user-defined application that combines techno-economic optimization and environmental modeling to evaluate the feasibility and sustainability of green hydrogen production systems. Built with an accessible GUI and modular codebase, the e-Hydrogen Cost Optimizer integrates key components such as photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine generation,...
This study applies a combination of prospective and time-explicit life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) via Bipolar Membrane Electrodialysis (BPMED), an emerging carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology. By combining prospective and time-explicit LCA, we developed a flexible, time- and location oriented LCA framework which captures both evolving background...
Highlights:
- CAIRN (CairnOpen) demo from CEA: brief demonstration of core
capabilities, modular technology components, scenario management,
MILP constraints for sizing/operation, multiple solver back-ends,
time-series I/O, and reproducible exports. - BW2 to CAIRN integration via GUI: a graphical interface links
Brightway2/Activity Browser activities to CAIRN,...
Topic
Hydrogen-based decentralized energy systems (H2-DES) are gaining prominence as potential solutions for local decarbonization of heat and power supply. We realized the life cycle assessment (LCA) of a H2-DES based on a combined heat and power internal combustion engine (ICE-CHP), the LCA being grounded on a techno-economic analysis (TEA) model implemented in OpenModelica. The study...
To facilitate the upscaling of LCA studies, so-called Product Category Template (PCT) data sets are developed and the photovoltaics (PV) product group is taken as an applicable example. We will present the contents and the workflows for PCTs, which can simplify life cycle modeling and increase the comparability and compliance of its results. The open-source file of only a few megabytes in size...
Using primary data for life cycle assessments is the common and preferred way to conduct life cycle assessments. But collecting data is time consuming, can be incomplete and only reflects a static and specific result. In order to generate reliable inventory data, the additional use of external software, like flowsheet simulation is necessary. Flowsheet simulation software is based on...
This work develops an end-to-end, low-code workflow that automatically converts heterogeneous documents—reports, theses and open-data PDFs—into high-quality, machine-readable Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) inventories. Built on the open-source orchestrator n8n, the pipeline (i) prunes non-informative pages with custom Python APIs, (ii) extracts text while preserving tables through the free...
Despite the increasing importance of FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) in academic research, structured data management remains an often-overlooked challenge in the life cycle assessment (LCA)-community. Most researchers work independently on separate projects and tools, which leads to isolated LCA models, little exchange of reusable data and repeated modelling of...
Highlights:
- Flexible, modular TEA-LCA framework enabling integration of parametric process models.
- Framework applied to a simulated Haber-Bosch process using electrolytic hydrogen.
Integrated environmental assessments in chemical process design are often constrained by current tools. Standard process simulators typically report only direct and energy-related...
The use of light-weight materials for automotive components (ecodesign strategy commonly known as lightweighting) can induce environmental benefits due to weight-induced energy savings in internal combustion engine vehicles. However, for battery electric vehicles, the effectiveness of lightweighting depends on the electricity grid mix powering the vehicle during its use phase. As Europe...
This study explores the parametric environmental assessment and optimization of locally manufactured SWTs. The studied system is a horizontal-axis wind turbine designed and built by the community of self-builders. The goal of this work is to support design decisions based on environmental performance by identifying trade-offs between key geometric parameters: mast height and rotor...
BONSAI is an automated LCI background database. It takes open data that is collected via APIs or scraped from websites, cleans and harmonizes it, and runs it through a multi-step workflow to produce an open LCI dataset. First, we build a multi-national monetary supply and use table (MSUT). Using production volumes and other auxiliary data, we disaggregate the data and add physical layers. This...
This session presents the final results of the Getting the Data Right project: BONSAI, a unique and open life-cycle assessment (LCA) database. This database is generated using an open-source codebase and built entirely on open data. BONSAI comprehensively quantifies the climate impacts associated with all inputs and outputs of the global economy. We will demonstrate how to import...
A university lab and two private companies have come together to form the Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative [1] with the primary goal of developing an open global MRIO model that builds off the USEEIO [2] and openCEDA [3] models. In this presentation I will share the initial direction and ambitions of the Cornerstone Initiative, covering technical details of the proposed initial...
This presentation explores Ecobalyse, France's public platform for environmental impact assessment, examining its strategic positioning and technical implementation. As a cornerstone of France's environmental labeling policy, Ecobalyse democratizes LCA methodology for businesses of all sizes.
Ecobalyse emerged from a critical policy imperative: scaling up environmental labeling across...
Dynamic Material Flow Analysis (MFA) is a cornerstone method in industrial ecology, enabling systematic, time-dependent tracking of materials through their life cycles and quantifying stock accumulation. The open-source tool ODYM has provided a generalized framework for custom MFA modelling, and is widely used in the community....
Activity Browser 3 has been in development for over a year now and we would love to show what we've been up to. In this demonstration we will cover all that's old and new in the latest version of the Activity Browser.
Most notable changes:
**- It’s been built on top of Brightway25
- It has out of the box support for multifunctionality
- It sports a fully redesigned...
The Reverse Engineering Lab (ReLab) of Leiden University CML is developing an open-source platform for collaborative data collection on product composition through disassembly documentation. Through citizen science approaches, the platform aims at filling data gaps in circular economy research through physical observation of the products currently on the market.
Workshop participants will...
Climate change constitutes a global challenge affecting across all regions of the world, producing significant risks to human health and natural ecosystems. Allocating global greenhouse gas emissions is necessary to identify effective mitigation strategies.
The methodology of environmentally extended multiregional input-output (EEMRIO) analysis enables the calculation of environmental...
Hybrid LCA utilizes Input Output data to account for the broader range of impacts occurring due to indirect effects of the increased demand for products or services. Performing Hybrid LCA requires the use of Input Output tables stored in databases such as EXIOBASE. Specific packages for parsing the database, such as MARIO, are available; but the linkage with the LCA foreground system is not...
The Digital Product Passports (DPP) from the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) aims to establish an interoperable and potentially distributed network of product and manufacturing information to promote traceability of products and materials, together with their circularity and sustainability performance. However, while standardization efforts are ongoing (e.g., DaCapo and...
Evaluating the sustainability of novel products and technologies, especially those at lower Technology Readiness Levels (TRL), presents unique challenges due to the inherent uncertainties and future developments. Environmental assessment like life cycle assessment (LCA) must do more than analyze today’s lab and pilot plants but also quantify the potential impacts of tomorrow’s full-scale...
The Circular Futures Lab seeks to establish a collaborative platform to explore African-centered pathways for sustainable materials and societal transformation. Focusing on material practices such as plastics recycling, waste valorization, and sustainable manufacturing, the initiative examines how these practices can shape circular economies and more equitable futures across the...
Reliable LCA background databases are essential for conducting robust environmental impact assessments. Brightway is one of the most flexible tools for performing LCA, yet it primarily relies on the ecoinvent database, making compatibility with other commercial datasets challenging. Consequently, the transparent integration of multiple background databases—such as ecoinvent, Agribalyse, or the...
ILCD is a large and complex data format, designed to allow for publication of unit processes, aggregated processes, and impact assessment data. This broad scope produced a complex format, with a typical dataset having over 100 fields spread across multiple files.
This complexity has significant downsides: cognitive overload, duplicated information, and non-compliant publication.
In this...
