Brightcon 2026, hackathon and courses

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 which Brightway and ecoinvent are built. For researchers without ecoinvent licensing — a common condition for self-funded doctoral candidates, public agencies, and consultancies in smaller markets — the practical question is whether these national databases can be combined with the open-source Python LCA ecosystem to support parametric, time-explicit assessment.
Approach. This presentation reports on a working bridge between the NZGBC API and lcpy (Gkousis & Katsou, 2025), a BSD-3-licensed Python package for parametric LCA and LCC. A connector module ingests the NZGBC REST API, normalises records to GWP-fossil/biogenic/luluc/stored sub-components, and feeds lcpy's external-unit-impact mode as direct dictionary inputs. The workflow currently runs a 99-cell parametric sweep — three pre-code NZ commercial-office archetypes × three climate zones × three grid-decarbonisation scenarios × interventions × HVAC sub-cases — against synthetic material inventories in under two minutes, producing dual-path (dynamic vs static grid EF) cumulative-carbon trajectories. Non-inversion is preserved as a first-class result. A live Jupyter notebook walks through the connector, the parametric loop, and the output structure. All code is open and reproducible.
Brightcon spirit. The session frames this work as a community discussion: whether bridging modules between national pre-characterised EPD databases and the Brightway ecosystem should be standardised, where they could live, and what interoperability with bw_timex's elementary-flow pipeline would require. The presentation makes the tooling, the limitations, and the open questions transparent.