Courses will take place on Sep 22nd, 2026.
We are offering two distinct technical tracks designed to accommodate participants at different stages of their open-source LCA journey. Please note that course registration is only available in combination with full conference attendance.
Track 1: Beginner's Course – Introduction to Brightway for LCA
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Core Focus: Foundations of the Brightway framework.
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Target Audience: LCA practitioners, researchers, and developers new to python-based sustainability assessment or transitioning from GUI-based software.
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What you will learn: You will dive into live Jupyter Notebook sessions covering the core architecture of Brightway, writing inventory data, running computational structures, and interpreting fundamental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results.
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Instructors: Massimo Pizzol, Ning An, Lotte Ansgaard Thomsen (AAU)
The course will also show you how to leverage AI as a tool for understanding, writing and debugging Python code in Brightway.
By the end of the course, you should be able to run comprehensive LCA calculations in Brightway, leveraging capabilities comparable to or beyond other established LCA alternative tools.
Track 2: Intermediate Course – Dynamic Aspects of LCA & Open-Source Integration
- Core Focus: Bringing time into life cycle assessment — moving beyond static snapshots to model how systems, inventories, and impacts evolve. The track covers two approaches in dedicated blocks: time-explicit LCA with timex and System Dynamics coupled with openLCA, followed by a joint session discussing reflections after learning and experiencing both.
- Target Audience: Practitioners with a solid LCA modelling foundation who want to extend their work toward temporally explicit and dynamic assessment. The two blocks run in different environments — timex uses Brightway and Python; the System Dynamics block uses openLCA — so a working footing in at least one is expected. You don't need to arrive fluent in both: we provide pre-course preparation so you can get up to speed in whichever is less familiar before the day begins.
- What you will learn: The track introduces the concepts and workflows behind dynamic LCA through two tools and two distinct approaches to the same problem, each in its own hands-on block. A cross-cutting reflection session closes the day: how each approach brings time into the model, where its projected future comes from, their respective strengths and limitations, and which suits what kind of question.
- Instructors: Timo Diepers (RWTH), Amelie Müller (CML Leiden/VITO), Alexander Koch (GreenDelta)
By the end of the course, you will be able to build a basic time-explicit inventory in bw_timex and a coupled System Dynamics–LCA model in openLCA, run and interpret dynamic results from each, and judge which approach fits a given research question. You will also leave with a clear sense of where each tool's assumptions about the future come from and what that means for the credibility of your results.