Session Descriptions

While openLCA is freely available and widely recognized as a robust software for life cycle assessment, its adoption in the Global South remains limited. The barriers extend beyond tool access: high costs of region-specific life cycle inventory data, limited institutional capacity, and lack of clarity on the return on investment of conducting LCAs. Many businesses in emerging economies continue to view LCA as a compliance burden rather than a driver of innovation or market differentiation. This session will challenge participants to explore systemic solutions—ranging from affordable regional datasets to business case framing—that can accelerate adoption. The target audience includes LCA practitioners, dataset developers, standard-setting bodies, academics, and organizations working in or with Global South markets.

Companies large and small need training in life cycle assessment (LCA), not only to innovate at the product and service level, but also to comply with European legislation, which is increasingly based on life cycle thinking. What professional education programs are already relying on openLCA ? How can openLCA be best used for such programs? Can we come up with best practices in terms of didactics and learning goals? W hat foreseeable developments in openLCA should be integrated into professional education programs as early as possible?

In this interactive session we will collect current practices on Circularity assessments, brainstorm general rules that can make a system more circular based on participant experience, and explore stretching the concept of circularity assessments by looking at circularity in the supply chain or pairing the assessment with an LCA. Those with experience in Circularity and Circular Economy are welcome, as well as those who want to learn more about the topic.

Although Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) often remains in a technical niche, product – level life cycle data can be strategically valuable for decisions relating to costs, risks and innovations. In this interactive 90 – minute Challenge Session, we demonstrate how to make LCA more widely applicable by using Data Maps to systematically link LCA data points to regulatory requirements (e.g. Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), including Digital Product Passports (DPPs)), as well as to internal business drivers. We do this by translating technical outputs (e.g. product carbon footprint, recycling rates and reparability) into business – relevant insights.

The session combines a 10 – minute presentation with an interactive brainwriting and stakeholder mapping workshop. Participants will identify which data serve which regulations, how LCA functions should be organisationally anchored and which quick wins (in terms of resource, time and cost savings) will build the business case.

The outcomes include concrete data map building blocks, a governance checklist and actionable steps that LCA practitioners and decision makers can use to increase LCA visibility and embed it in corporate processes.

Building on the topic session, this panel discussion addresses the increasingly complex reality facing companies and LCA practitioners who must navigate overlapping, sometimes conflicting sustainability regulations. As organisations grapple with CBAM reporting, CSRD disclosure requirements, EU Taxonomy alignment, and sector-specific frameworks, the traditional boundaries of LCA work are being stretched beyond recognition.

This session explores the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool to evaluate the environmental impacts of agricultural systems, from crop production to livestock management. The session also welcomes studies on biomass valorisation. It will address methodologies for assessing resource use, greenhouse gas emissions, and sustainability trade-offs across the supply chain. Key objectives include showcasing recent research, highlighting case studies from different contexts, and discussing how LCA can inform policy, technology adoption, and sustainable farming practices. The session aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and industry stakeholders who are interested in advancing sustainable agriculture through evidence-based decision-making. By providing insights into challenges and opportunities of LCA in agriculture, the session will enable dialogue and collaboration toward reducing environmental footprints and enhancing resilience in the sector.

The topic of carbon storage in buildings remains a point of contention in both policy and LCA community, challenging the static assumptions of current standards and raising critical questions about dynamic carbon accounting. This challenge session aims to convene interdisciplinary experts to examine the role of construction materials, both bio-based and mineral, in sequestering carbon within the built environment. Discussions will focus on methodological advances required to quantify, verify, and ensure long-term carbon storage, including the integration of digital tools like Building Information Modelling (BIM) for transparent tracking. The forum will explore forward-thinking design strategies that optimize carbon uptake without compromising performance or durability, while also engaging with emerging policies, certification schemes, and financial instruments such as carbon credits. Case studies from real-world projects will provide empirical grounding for the debate, highlighting both challenges and successes. The event aims to promote global cooperation, harmonization of approaches, and technology transfer, aiming to position buildings not merely as passive consumers of resources but as active agents of climate mitigation. Through this dialogue, the session seeks to clarify methodological pathways, inform future standards, and support a transformative shift toward climate-positive construction.

The session will explore studies that consider plastic repurpose, reuse, reduce, refuse and recycle. Assessments can go beyond LCA, e.g. System Dynamics, or other. Generally, we will be looking at answering the question of “what to do with plastics looking at the future”?

Social LCA is an established procedure, yet many challenges remain, considering method, data and acceptance. This session is meant for exchange of experiences related to the application of social LCA. What was the result? How was it taken up by the audience? What are pain-points in an application? What worked well?

This session focuses on integration opportunities and challenges regarding broader sustainability assessments that combine the two approaches LCSA and System Dynamics. The session will host presentations regarding case studies, frameworks, validation, data collection as well as software solutions for system dynamics sustainability assessments and facilitate a discussion on opportunities and challenges on this novel approach.

LCA has always been a data-hungry approach; recently, new possibilities to create datasets have emerged, but of course “traditional” approaches still remain in use. This session is about experiences and solutions about creating unit process datasets, with or without AI support, with and without industry input, and about quality assurance and compilation of created datasets.

As global energy systems undergo rapid transformation in response to climate targets, decarbonisation goals, and technological innovation, Life Cycle Assessment has become an essential tool to evaluate and guide sustainable energy transitions. This session seeks to highlight methodologies and case studies that apply LCA to energy production, conversion, distribution, storage, and consumption across scales and geographies. We invite researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to submit abstracts.

openLCA is increasingly used integrated in other tools and into larger IT ecosystems, be it laboratory systems, ERP systems, process engineering software, web-tools, or others. This session is to collect examples and share experiences, and lessons learned. This can include using the openLCA API and also more recent developments such as the openLCA libraries.

This session addresses the increasingly complex reality facing companies and LCA practitioners who must navigate overlapping, sometimes conflicting sustainability regulations. As organisations grapple with CBAM reporting, CSRD disclosure requirements, EU Taxonomy alignment, and sector-specific frameworks, the traditional boundaries of LCA work are being stretched beyond recognition.

Building on the topic session, this panel discussion addresses the increasingly complex reality facing companies and LCA practitioners who must navigate overlapping, sometimes conflicting sustainability regulations. As organisations grapple with CBAM reporting, CSRD disclosure requirements, EU Taxonomy alignment, and sector-specific frameworks, the traditional boundaries of LCA work are being stretched beyond recognition.