Brightcon 2026, hackathon and courses

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 society's metabolism, and must thereby reckon with complexity and dynamism. Developments in time-explicit LCA can allow us to reach beyond the static, steady-state assumptions conventional to LCA.
3. A reproducible notebook (based on the bw_timex package for Brightway) illustrates how time-explicit LCA can be coupled with a dynamic system while maintaining the conceptual integrity of both tools. Such coupling invites a broader integration between LCA and other Industrial Ecology data and tools.

Concise description
There is a tension between the heterogeneous development of tools to understand and represent society's metabolism on one hand and on the other hand to provide LCA practitioners with clear guidelines, streamlined where possible based on justifiable heuristics. With the development of time-explicit LCA, there is a promise of systematically breaking from the static, steady-state assumptions conventional to LCA by capturing time-dependent change within a system. Yet in doing so, this approach requires considerably more data and, while its computational structure has been robustly described, this does not extend to a shared understanding of what it means to apply time-explicit LCA in practice.

This presentation will demonstrate an approach to modelling a time-explicit product system. By largely relying on the existing features of the bw_timex package for Brightway, a product system can be modelled to represent a functional unit which is not limited to a lifecycle as reflecting a single object, but as something that occurs and changes over time, and captures the function of many objects over time. An illustrative dynamic stock model will be used to demonstrate this point in an open-source, reproducible notebook. Furthermore, the principles demonstrated can be applied in conjunction with other dynamic models.

By formulating and sharing this illustrative case study, we hope to contribute to the ongoing effort of developing what it means to conduct prospective LCA in support of a particular decision context: in terms of its goal and scope as well as in terms of its robust and transparent computational execution. This effort can only be fruitful when it engages diverse segments of the LCA community.