Brightcon 2026, hackathon and courses

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 initiative to tackle this issue by gathering both academic and industrial stakeholders. A specific emphasis will be placed on the governance model, which ensures data transparency and reliability, and on how to enable collaboration in the context of such an opaque and complex industry.

The second half of the presentation will be dedicated to describing the technical approach for generating missing trustworthy data. The data production pipeline is initiated by collaboratively gathering information on processes and materiality of the subject of the study, via literature review and expert interviews. This knowledge is gathered to build a parametric tool, in Python, able to model advanced processes and complex supply chains. We will present an overview of the various technical challenges and solutions associated with it, enabling the bridge between traditional and parametrical LCA through Brightway. A special emphasis will be put on how to ensure interoperability with background databases. Finally, the tool models are mathematically corrected thanks to material analyses to further build confidence. This approach is being validated on the use cases of wafer, PCBs, screens, HDDs, and optical sensors, and is aimed to be extended via the naKnow initiative.

We will conclude by demonstrating how our tool helps us in fostering collaboration among experts, without requiring a deep technical background in software development and LCA.