Brightcon 2026, hackathon and courses

Brightway’s inventory calculations usually rely on direct sparse solvers such as PARDISO or UMFPACK. These are robust and fast for many applications, but they can become a major bottleneck when technosphere systems grow very large. In particular, the matrix factorisation step can require far more memory than the sparse matrix itself, making calculations on large or dense systems painfully slow...

Highlights

• Integration of the edges Python library into the BONSAI open-source
  framework for spatialized LCIA.
• Demonstrates how exchange-based LCIA
  enables geographically explicit impact assessment beyond global
  averages.
• Case study: quantifying how French consumption drives
  water scarcity in producer regions worldwide. Fully reproducible,
  ...

Life-cycle assessments are rarely applied as often to the operational decision-making in production as to the planning stage, despite the significant cumulative environmental impacts of high-volume processes. The bottleneck here is that an LCA is too complex for daily use, and decision-makers in production are not trained to interpret the results.

For the ENCIRCLE project, parameterised...

AI has fundamentally changed the way that most software is developed. This talk will summarize how Brightway needs to change its structure, to make development more broadly base, consistent, and stable. Big changes include a move toward more standard data schemas, documented and strictly enforced interfaces between modules, and refactoring the bw2io library.

Highlights / Discussion Points

Shrecc is an open-source Python package that creates time-aware electricity mix databases for Brightway using live-tracked electricity data from the Energy-Charts API for 45 European countries.

The tool allows LCA practitioners to move beyond annual average electricity mixes by integrating hourly electricity data into Brightway 2 and 2.5 projects,...