Highlights / Discussion Points

• TianGong starts from building a Chinese LCA database and extends toward broader LCA infrastructure.
• The infrastructure connects database development with data structuring, review, calculation, interoperability, and reuse.
• AI is used within controlled, auditable workflows to support data curation and quality governance.
• This approach can help...

The ICT sector still struggles to fully understand its environmental footprint. LCA can help in assessing it, but is currently hindered by the lack of open, trustworthy, and quality data, which can be explained by two elements: 1) a complex supply chain, and 2) business secrecy in a competitive environment.

In this presentation, the objective is first to present naKnow: a collaborative...

Agribalyse is one of the most widely used public food LCA databases, but reproducing its SimaPro-based results in Brightway is not a simple CSV import. The source data arrive with SimaPro elementary-flow conventions, adapted EF 3.1 characterization factors, background datasets copied or renamed across ecoinvent versions, unit drift, and waste-treatment modelling conventions. This creates a...

We present TRAILS, an open-source Python framework for time-explicit life cycle assessment (LCA) that enables deep temporalization of product systems. Rather than representing the technosphere as a collection of year-specific, independent two-dimensional matrices, TRAILS treats it as an interconnected temporal structure (i.e., a three-dimensional tensor) in which processes and exchanges can be...

Highlights

• AI-assisted workflow for extracting life cycle inventory data from
  secondary resources
• Use of open-source LLMs and fine-tuned
  classification models for document screening and information
  extraction
• Harmonization of heterogeneous inventories for emerging
  technologies with low technology readiness levels
• Transparent and reproducible workflow...

Highlights
1. AI integration in LCA introduces both new uncertainties and undetectable errors that differ fundamentally from traditional LCA uncertainty
2. A clear distinction is drawn between AI-induced uncertainty (stochastic, plausible outputs) and AI-induced error (hallucinated, factually wrong outputs)
3. A stage-based framework is proposed mapping AI-induced uncertainty and errors...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in professional services, including sustainability assessment. However, their reliability in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) remains largely unexplored, particularly in the interpretation of results to provide mitigation advice and the treatment of circular value chains.

This short study benchmarks at least 3 LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT and Llama) as...

Highlights / Discussion Points

• A global physical uncertainty-aware oil Supply-Use Table (SUT) compiled through an AI-assisted scientific workflow.
• Human input was limited to prompting, review, and modelling judgement; AI generated the code.
• Demonstrates R/targets as a reproducible backbone for agentic data engineering.
• Discusses strengths, failure modes, memory management,...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in life cycle assessment (LCA) workflows, supporting inventory completion, literature synthesis, scenario analysis, and interpretation. Yet while AI is often framed as an efficiency gain for sustainability assessment, the environmental impacts of AI workflows themselves remain largely unexamined. Current AI-enabled LCA approaches tend to...

The LCA community has invested heavily in domain-specific AI: curated ontologies, hand-crafted matching algorithms, and specialised models trained on ecoinvent. We believe this approach, while well-intentioned, is following a familiar trajectory. Across field after field, the same pattern has emerged: domain-specific AI, carefully engineered with expert knowledge, is eventually overtaken by...

Land-based carbon sequestration strategies require linking soil carbon dynamics with supply chain responses, accounting for land-use effects and biomass valorization. This work develops a parametric modelling workflow in Brightway 2.5 for consequential LCA of soil carbon sequestration strategies (SCS) in French croplands. Life cycle inventories integrate soil organic carbon (SOC) trajectories...

A Python Package for the Simultaneous Global Sensitivity Analysis of Foreground and Background Parameters in Life Cycle Assessment

Highlights/Discussion Points

• Existing Python packages can perform global sensitivity analysis (GSA) of foreground or background parameters, but not both at once.
• We propose a package based on Python and Brightway that simultaneously performs GSA on...

Highlights

• A coupling framework featuring a dual presampling strategy paired with a preaggregation step is developed to efficiently combine stochastic inputs with background stochasticity in LCA.
• The pelicun_2_brightway2 library is introduced to bridge pelicun and brightway2, open-source tools to perform asset performance assessment for the built environment and LCA, respectively....

Highlights/Discussion Points:
- Introduction of the problem
- How to go about assessing this issue with BW
- Results: Uncertainty due to price variance in economic allocation. Comparison to other sources of uncertainty in LCA.

Concise Description
Economic allocation is widely used in life cycle assessment (LCA) to distribute inputs and emissions among co-products, yet it...

3-min sponsor pitch from 2-0 LCA

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) models are increasingly complex and interdisciplinary. Challenges related to transparency, reproducibility, and data interoperability are becoming more critical for both research and practice. Integrating diverse datasets, combining complex modelling approaches, and ensuring methodological consistency across disciplines require not only technical competence but also...

This hands-on workshop introduces a Python-based modelling framework to support consequential life cycle assessment of biobased products using openly available bioeconomy data. Participants will actively work with Jupyter notebooks and an open-source repository to install, set up, and run the model.
Through guided exercises, attendees will learn how to construct a bioeconomy matrix from...

Highlights

1. Showcases MyLCA, a Python modelling framework for generic, parametric and modular LCA with Brightway25
2. Enables reusable, composable, parametric LCA models through grouped containers and activities, and associated parameters
3. Demonstrates a reproducible workflow to rebuild and compare published battery LCA studies
4. Identifies and quantifies drivers of impact...

Heat pump deployment is widely assumed to reduce building-sector greenhouse gas emissions. This assumption holds in countries with low-carbon electricity grids but has rarely been tested for carbon-intensive grid contexts using open LCA tools and data. This contribution presents a Brightway2-based case study that computes the operational global warming potential (GWP) of a residential...

The decarbonization of maritime transport requires scalable fuel pathways that achieve both economic viability and low life cycle emissions. This study presents a prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) of Power-to-Liquid (PtL) e-diesel production within the FLEET 4.0 framework, targeting maritime applications in Saudi Arabia. The work integrates detailed process simulation with system-level...

Highlights
• The SALCA models transitioned from an Excel tool to a Python implementation.
• A modular structure separates parameters, tables, models, and calculation levels.
• The long-term and large collaborative effort required coordination and harmonization.
• The open source aims to facilitate reproducibility, reuse, and external collaboration.

Description
Agriculture is a...

Highlights / Discussion Points
- Why and how it was built, its architecture and what it allows today.
- Demo of an inventory/impact calculation, hotspot analysis and a what-if substitution scenario
- How it was used for Ecobalyse
- Openings on the real needs of the LCA sector : data

Concise Description
For fun and continuous learning, I wrote a brand new LCA software from...

Discussion Points
• Modeling needs in the electronics LCA community.
• Introduction of the open-source framework developed at UCLouvain.
• How does this framework facilitate data sharing and reuse?
• Demonstration with a dense printed circuit board with various integrated circuits.

Context
Electronic products are complex and heterogeneous. As a result, their LCA modeling is...

HIGHLIGHTS
• Calculating new material-related metrics: amount of manufactured material
• Automatic calculation based only on Life Cycle Inventories data through the implementation of an LCIA method in the Brightway framework
• Comparison with existing tools Relics and Edges
• Demonstration with simple examples and exploration of the ecoinvent database through this new...

Highlights

1. The development of 'time-explicit LCA' and indeed 'prospective LCA' requires further conceptual development to specify what such an LCA represents, with the development of a common understanding and vocabulary with which to characterise a given approach. We propose such conceptual contributions.
2. A product system in LCA represents some interconnected aspects of...

Industrial Ecology increasingly aims at connecting complementary assessment frameworks rather than limiting analysis to conventional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). In this context, we propose a framework to assess what we define as intrinsic circularity, i.e., the direct circulation of physical flows through and across product systems (1).

The framework questions the conventional definition...

Authors: Timen M. Boeve and Søren Løkke
presenting author

Effective data management and data interpretation are essential prerequisites for conducting robust and decision-relevant Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies, particularly within large and complex organisations. This presentation draws on experiences from a PhD project in which an organisation-wide consequential LCA was conducted...

Power-to-Gas technologies that convert CO₂ into renewable biomethane are attracting increasing interest as routes for long-term energy storage, carbon valorisation, and decarbonisation of the gas grid. Among them, electromethanogenesis, where electrotrophic methanogenic archaea reduce CO₂ to CH₄ at a biocathode driven by renewable electricity, is a promising but highly coupled...

Highlights / Discussion Points:

• LLMs can support automated unit process mapping pipelines
• Open-source language models can be fine-tuned to case specific knowledge bases
• These models can be efficiently implemented to open-source software such as Brightway2
• Language model driven methodologies require rigorous validation methods and metrics

**Concise...

Highlights and Discussion Points
- Facilitating a model-based integration of Life Cycle Assessments into early product development
- Supporting the transferability of the LCA method based on an open-source, Brightway-based software tool
- Incorporating uncertainties caused by lack of data and low system knowledge to prevent unaware design choices
- Providing a comprehensible way of...

Environmental sustainability assessment is increasingly part of the evidence infrastructure that underpins business decisions, regulatory preparedness and long-term strategy. Companies need models that represent products and supply chains with sufficient accuracy to identify hotspots, prioritise interventions, compare design alternatives and anticipate the implications of future technologies...

Modern sustainability assessments increasingly require dynamic integration of life cyclce assessment (LCA) results with engineering simulations for systems optimization, real-time decision support, and multi-physics modeling. While Brightway-based LCA makes this integration more feasible than end-to-end software stacks (e.g., SimaPro, OpenLCA), coupling with external simulation environments...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), both in theory and practice, has traditionally relied on a strict distinction between the environment and the economy. Weidema et al. (2018) proposed a conceptual shift by relaxing this boundary and unifying economic activities and environmental mechanisms within an extended techno-biosphere matrix. In this formulation, environmental feedbacks can be represented in...

Regioinvent is a novel, open-source Python framework designed to work seamlessly with Brightway to unlock the full potential of regionalization within the ecoinvent database. The tool systematically generates thousands of contextualized activity datasets by adapting key local parameters, such as electricity mixes, heat production, and waste treatment, to specific national contexts. This allows...

Energy System Models (ESMs) are powerful tools for designing and assessing energy transition scenarios, but their environmental scope is typically restricted to direct carbon emissions during the operation phase. This narrow framing overlooks the full life-cycle burden of energy infrastructure — from manufacturing to end-of-life — as well as a broad range of impact categories beyond climate...

An LCA Data Package Manager (LDPM)

Highlights

• Open-source LCA data is increasingly being published in smaller collections than whole background DBs
• The classic software-package-manager pattern might be usefully adapted to LCA data
• Prototyping of an LCA Data Package Manager (LDPM) was initiated to support knitting U.S. FLCAC data into a unified DB

Description

The U.S....

We present Firefly, an open-source (AGPL) multi-user web interface for Brightway with browsing, editing, LCIA and contribution analysis. It runs at brightway.eaternity.ch and as a desktop app. The latest release ships preloaded with the public release of the Eaternity Database: 1,066 food products re-based from a licensed background onto the open Swiss BAFU/UVEK 2026 database, each with its...

Battery lifecycle assessment (LCA) increasingly depends on heterogeneous and rapidly evolving datasets originating from manufacturing, operation, second-life use, and recycling contexts. However, these datasets are often encoded in incompatible formats, making reuse, interoperability, and transparent data exchange difficult across projects and organizations. At the same time, sustainability...

Highlights / Discussion Points:
Primary takeaway: How can lab based product disassembly and characterization data reliably feed LCA and policy relevant open databases?
We hope to co-create the following takeaways:
A shared understanding of minimum requirements for reliability and usability of product characterization data in LCA databases
Community input on priority gaps and barriers to...

Highlights / Discussion Points

• Introducing MODASTI, a proposed open-source platform for modular and composable LCIA configurations
• Exploring whether there is a community need for transparent, interoperable, and collaboratively maintained LCIA infrastructure
• Discussing modular schema design, provenance, versioning, and persistent identifiers for reproducible LCIA compositions
  -...

Brightway’s inventory calculations usually rely on direct sparse solvers such as PARDISO or UMFPACK. These are robust and fast for many applications, but they can become a major bottleneck when technosphere systems grow very large. In particular, the matrix factorisation step can require far more memory than the sparse matrix itself, making calculations on large or dense systems painfully slow...

Highlights

• Integration of the edges Python library into the BONSAI open-source
  framework for spatialized LCIA.
• Demonstrates how exchange-based LCIA
  enables geographically explicit impact assessment beyond global
  averages.
• Case study: quantifying how French consumption drives
  water scarcity in producer regions worldwide. Fully reproducible,
  ...

Life-cycle assessments are rarely applied as often to the operational decision-making in production as to the planning stage, despite the significant cumulative environmental impacts of high-volume processes. The bottleneck here is that an LCA is too complex for daily use, and decision-makers in production are not trained to interpret the results.

For the ENCIRCLE project, parameterised...

AI has fundamentally changed the way that most software is developed. This talk will summarize how Brightway needs to change its structure, to make development more broadly base, consistent, and stable. Big changes include a move toward more standard data schemas, documented and strictly enforced interfaces between modules, and refactoring the bw2io library.

Highlights / Discussion points

Takeaway: ElecImpact provides a graph-based data structure that makes life-cycle inventory (LCI) data and models reusable, traceable, and directly interoperable with existing tools such as Brightway. The code lives in a multi-package monorepo, and the data lives in a separate repository.
Open modular tools: ElecImpact is fully open source under a...

Highlights / Discussion Points

Shrecc is an open-source Python package that creates time-aware electricity mix databases for Brightway using live-tracked electricity data from the Energy-Charts API for 45 European countries.

The tool allows LCA practitioners to move beyond annual average electricity mixes by integrating hourly electricity data into Brightway 2 and 2.5 projects,...

Digital Product Passports (DPPs) will soon become mandatory for many products sold in the European Union. These digital records of product information are an important development for supply chain transparency and support of conscious consumer choices. Companies see the need for compliance, but clear guidance on data requirements is missing.
To support data collection and data sharing across...

Highlights
1. Most AI-assisted LCA research focuses on data gap filling, automated foreground system construction remains underexplored.
2. A user-driven pipeline is proposed: users input a rough system description, and LLMs automatically construct the foreground system with system boundaries and key inventory parameters.
3. The framework will be implemented in Python and integrated...

Highlights / Discussion Points
• ISAT (IPM Self-Assessment Tool) is the first freely accessible, web-based platform integrating the PLEU with GHG emissions and cost indicators for field-level crop protection scenario comparison: http://synops.julius-kuehn.de/support.
• New harmonized pesticide risk indicator (PLEU) covering 41 hazard metrics across environmental fate, ecotoxicity, and human...

Highlights/Dicussion Points:
- Present the brightway libraries used in EcoAgent
- Share jupyter code for using AI-RAG based database search and [open source repository][1] I made
- Future objective to balance self sustaining business model and open code share

Concise Description
EcoAgent is an AI assistant for LCA. It relies on a few Brightway libraries. In this talk, the...

Achieving net-zero targets necessitates large quantities of newly installed renewable energy capacity and sustainable hydrogen production. Since the projected demand of hydrogen and its derivatives in various end use sectors in Europe cannot be produced locally economically, imports from regions with surpluses of renewable energy are likely. New trade routes will emerge, transporting hydrogen...

Highlights:

• Introduction of Lighthouse, a Python package integrating Brightway and premise
• Flexible building modelling framework
• Automated generation of the solution space of phased renovation scenarios
• Time-resolved life cycle assessment with dynamic life cycle inventory
• Advanced decision-support capabilities
• Open-source, scalable, and interoperable design

...

Many life cycle inventories are technically public but practically unusable: they are buried in PDFs, supplementary spreadsheets, or tables with weak metadata, unclear licensing, and no stable version history. Sharing data with interested parties is often hindered by differences in LCA software and data formats, background database versions, and other incompatibilities. CLIC (Curated Life...

Context
At Brightcon 2025, Départ de Sentier highlighted three fundamental life cycle assessment (LCA) data-related challenges (findability, maintenance, and flexibility) and decided to focus on three solutions: vocabulary, models, and data [1]. Although the community recognizes the need for FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles in LCA data, the landscape...

Switzerland's environmental agency BAFU published an "ecoinvent alike" open LCA Database in December 2025. It is planned to have a yearly regular update of the database. It has a focus on Switzerland but includes “RoE”, “RER”, “RoW” and “GLO” datasets as well. So far the official versions are published in ecospold1 and OpenLCA's zolca format. The OpenLCA version includes characterisation...

Highlights:
- Hydrogen deployment is a technology–policy–region alignment problem, not a single-pathway ranking exercise.
- The same federal policy produces uneven provincial outcomes because pathway cost drivers differ by region.
- Methane pyrolysis has a conditional transition role, while low-carbon electrolysis is better aligned with long-term deep...

This contribution presents an open-source Python workflow for variance-based global sensitivity analysis of upcycling life cycle assessment inventories, built on Brightway2 and the SALib library. The workflow enables practitioners to identify which foreground parameters drive result variability before committing to a full comparative study, addressing a common but under-supported step in LCA...

Context. A growing number of national green-building councils publish open EPD databases that provide pre-characterised GWP values per EN 15978 lifecycle module — the NZGBC Embodied Carbon Database in New Zealand, EPiC in Australia, ICE in the UK, ÖKOBAUDAT in Germany. These databases are explicitly designed to be open to any tool provider, yet they sit outside the elementary-flow paradigm on...

Railway infrastructure operators manage assets with lifespans of 30–50 years. Renewal and replacement decisions lock in cost and carbon trajectories for decades. Current software focuses either on operations or on cost planning, yet no tools are available to integrate Prospective LCA (pLCA) into decision-making and long-term planning. Current asset management platforms optimize decisions based...

The treatment of uncertainty is a central issue in life cycle assessment (LCA), especially when results are used to support decision-making processes. However, many LCA studies still skip this step because it requires additional knowledge, effort and computation resources. MOCA is a Python package that aims to lower these barriers by making uncertainty analysis more time-efficient and easier...

Highlights

• PCFBench is a proposed benchmark for AI-supported Product Carbon Footprinting consisting of 6 independently scored subtasks, scoring systems on workflow stages rather than final kg CO2-eq values
• Currently contains 614 expert-curated test items, from EPDs, practitioner-developed cases, and technical documents, released as open JSONL with a Python evaluation harness
  -...

The environmental performance of competing water electrolysis systems for hydrogen production is not fixed, as it depends on the electricity system in which the electrolyzer operates and on how that system evolves. This study presents a prospective, scenario-based life cycle assessment comparing alkaline (AEC), proton exchange membrane (PEMEC), and solid oxide (SOEC) electrolysis under Saudi...

Highlights / Discussion Points
- Scrap composition is the dominant environmental driver in specialty electric arc furnace steelmaking.
- Prospective life cycle assessment reveals how decarbonization reduces environmental impacts over time.
- Energy transition scenarios reveal that reductions in climate change impacts may come at the expense of higher land use...