Brightcon 2026, hackathon and courses

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 lens
• Industrial-Academic collaboration for open-source tools development😊

CONCISE DESCRIPTION

1. Need, goal and specifications
Impact indicators related to materials depletion, criticality, or circularity are complex to understand. An industrial company expressed the need for a complementary material-related indicator based on simple physical flows: the quantity of manufactured materials (eg. copper, aluminium or steel). The objective is to extract this physical metric directly from Life Cycle Inventories (LCI) data, similarly to how the Python library Edges does. Contrary to Edges, the new method is implemented as a Brightway Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) method to benefit from the full range of functionalities of LCIA methods within the Brightway framework.

2. Material method” implementation
The “material method” has been developed in Python language and implemented in the Brightway framework. It was tested with ecoinvent 3.11-cutoff & attributional.
The main principles are explained with a copper-related example. A new placeholder biosphere flow “copper material” with an amount of “1kg” is added to ecoinvent activities that produce 1kg of a reference product called “copper, cathode”. An algorithm also avoids double accounting of copper at the production stage and market stage. An LCIA indicator associated with one characterization factor (1kg/1kg of the new “copper material” pseudo biosphere flow) is also created.

3. Results
The method was applied to several ecoinvent activities for different materials to demonstrate that it accounts for:
• the material used in the foreground of the LCI
• the upstream material used to produce this material
• the material used for all other non-copper-related activities
The results were compared with results obtained with the Python libraries Edges and Relics.
This method was also applied to ecoinvent activities for copper, steel, and aluminium materials to explore the complex industrial value chain modeled by ecoinvent database through this new lens.

4. Conclusion
This method offers a new material-related lens to explore LCI through new metrics. It can be easily implemented for any reference product, not necessarily material- related.

Disclaimer
This work has been conducted through a collaboration with the French Transmission System Operator RTE and Mines Paris – PSL university.