Sessions

Submit your abstract to one of our sessions

The following sessions accept applications for oral and poster presentations at openLCA.conf 2027 until 1 December 2026. They are divided into 5 different clusters. Looking forward to receiving your application!

Submit your abstract

Energy Systems

Energy systems are undergoing rapid transformation to meet climate, energy security, and sustainability goals. This session explores the application of life cycle assessment to energy technologies, infrastructure, and systems, including renewable energy, fossil energy with mitigation technologies, energy storage, hydrogen, bioenergy, and emerging solutions. Contributions addressing methodological advances, system-level assessments, trade-offs, and decision support for energy transitions are welcome.

LCA of chemicals

This session explores the evolving role of life cycle assessment in the development, production, use, and end-of-life management of chemicals and chemical products. Contributions may address methodological advances, emerging production pathways, circularity and renewable feedstocks, prospective LCA, and the assessment of environmental and health-related impacts. Particular attention will be given to developments such as Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD), carbon capture and utilization, chemical recycling, and the increasing use of LCA to support innovation and policy-making.

Plastic Packaging and Plastics Litter: Sustainability Assessments and Packaging Alternatives

Life Cycle Assessment is a common tool to measure sustainability, but it can also lack indicators for current pressing environmental problems, like plastics litter.
This session combines studies on plastic packaging, potential alternatives and/or the implementation of plastic littering assessments within LCA studies.

Agriculture & Food Systems

This session will explore how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and its complementary methods, such as Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social LCA (sLCA),can be applied to drive sustainability improvements across agriculture and food supply chains, from primary production to consumption and waste management.

Key objectives
1. Present case studies using LCA to assess climate change mitigation, water scarcity, and land-use change in agricultural systems.
2. Demonstrate how integrating LCC and sLCA provides a more complete sustainability picture, moving beyond environmental impacts alone.
3. Address critical methodological challenges, including data availability, allocation methods, and modelling of biogenic carbon.
4. Foster discussion on how LCA results can be translated into actionable strategies for farmers, food processors, retailers, and policymakers.

Target audience: LCA practitioners, sustainability managers in the agri-food sector, researchers, policymakers, and consultants working on food system transformation.

LCAs in the building sector

The building sector plays a key role in achieving sustainability and climate goals. This session highlights how life cycle assessment can inform decisions on building design, material selection, construction practices, and end-of-life strategies to reduce environmental impacts across the life cycle. Critical discussion points will further revolve around carbon storage in buildings, dynamic carbon account, current standards and certification schemes. All in all, the session seeks to clarify methodological pathways and bring together researchers and LCA practioners working in the building sector.

Policy and Sustainability Assessments: Building Stronger Science-Policy Connections

This session explores the interaction between policy and sustainability assessment from two complementary perspectives. First, it highlights lessons learned from implementing life cycle approaches in governance and decision-making. Second, it examines policy developments that are influencing and reshaping the way sustainability assessments are conducted. Together, these perspectives aim to provide a foundation for strengthening science–policy connections and fostering more effective evidence-based decision-making.

EPDs

Environmental Product Declaratons (EPDs) are booming and openLCA has some nice features to support creation of EPDs and also using EPDs for other models. Time to discuss experiences and good solutions but also issues discovered by practitioners.

Innovations in Product Specific Data: DPP and beyond

Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and emerging digital infrastructures are transforming how product-specific environmental data are generated, shared, and used. This session explores innovations that enable more granular, transparent, and traceable data for LCA and environmental footprinting. Contributions may address DPPs, data interoperability, digitalization, automated data collection, verification, and approaches that move beyond generic datasets toward product-level assessments.

Measuring Circularity – What Is the Best Way?

Circularity and a Circular Economy is in the EU agenda formally since the Green Deal (2019), but is there a consensus on metrics measuring circularity? Hundreds of indicators exist, and some are more commonly used than others, like the Material Circularity Indicator from the Ellen MacArthur foundation, introduced in 2015. More recently, the ISO 59000 series offer guidance, where the ISO 59020 depicts specific indicators to use.

This session aims to explore Circularity Indicators themselves. This can be done, for example, through insights gained during the application of circularity indicators on case studies, but not specifically. Presentations can also explore the option of not using indicators at all.

Spatial and Regionalized Life Cycle Assessments

Life cycle assessment is increasingly moving beyond global average assumptions to account for geographic variability in environmental impacts and resource use. This session explores recent methodological developments, data innovations, and practical applications of spatially explicit and regionalized LCA. Topics may include spatial differentiation of impact assessment, regionalized inventories, geospatial modeling, land-use impacts, biodiversity assessment, water scarcity, and decision support for place-based sustainability challenges.

Advances in Sustainability Assessments: Temporalized LCA, Broader Systems, Planetary Boundaries

Linear, attributional life cycle models used in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) struggle to reflect some key concepts of sustainability. While they provide valuable insights into environmental impacts, they may overlook broader system-level considerations.
Some important questions that oft remain unanswered:

– How does a solution perform within specific temporal and regional contexts?
– What indirect consequences may arise from the introduction of a product or technology? Are there rebound effects?
– How does a solution perform in absolute terms, particularly with respect to planetary boundaries and other sustainability thresholds?

This technical session invites contributions that address these challenges and advance sustainability assessment methodologies beyond conventional LCA approaches. We welcome research that develops, demonstrates, or applies novel methods for assessing sustainability in a more comprehensive, context-sensitive, and systems-oriented manner.

Social LCA – Case Studies and Advancements in Methodologies

This session will explore recent developments in social life cycle assessment (sLCA), bringing together methodological advances and practical applications across sectors and value chains. Contributions will highlight emerging approaches to sLCA studies, data and indicator development, incorporation of stakeholder perspectives, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods. Case studies will demonstrate how evolving S-LCA methodologies can support more robust and decision-relevant sustainability assessments

LCI Databases

This session addresses advances and challenges in linked to Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) databases. Presentations may address topics such as the development of LCI databases, the interoperability between flow systems, database system models, and data uncertainty and validation. The session will also highlight emerging approaches to LCI data generation and management, including digitalization, automation, and the use of new data sources.

Advances in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA)

Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) continues to evolve to better capture environmental impacts and support robust sustainability decision-making. This session offers a plattform for presentations addresseing topics such as advances in impact assessment methods, indicators, characterization factors, spatial and temporal differentiation, and emerging impact categories.

AI for LCA: Tools, solutions, problems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing and finding applications across all sectors. This session explores its role in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), including AI-assisted data collection, impact prediction, and the environmental implications of model training, execution, and data center operations. It will also examine whether gains in computational efficiency lead to overall reductions in environmental impacts. By bringing together questions of data quality, decision reliability, and environmental trade-offs, the session aims to identify where AI can add value, where high-quality source data remain essential, and how the benefits and burdens of AI use can be assessed.

Advancing LCA Through Open‑Source Collaboration

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is indispensable for credible sustainability work, yet many companies and organisations still resist regulatory reporting because LCA remains expensive, time‑consuming, and difficult to scale. To achieve widespread adoption, LCA must become faster, more efficient, and dramatically more cost‑effective. Large commercial investments are not the solution — they only work for highly similar product lines, and investors ultimately expect returns. This session invites the openLCA community, academia, and private initiatives to showcase practical, low‑cost approaches: open‑source technologies, free and cost-effective tools, shared data infrastructures, and collaborative modelling. We particularly welcome reusable openLCA models, blueprints, templates, and modular workflows that reduce duplication and empower practitioners as well as related approaches and ideas. The goal is to build a community-driven ecosystem where accessible, transparent, and scalable LCA becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Extending openLCA: Connections to External Tools and Custom Workflows

This session will explore the use of openLCA as an LCA engine its integration into engineering, scientific and industrial software environments, allowing users to build customized workflows and applications around it.

– connections between openLCA and tools used in chemical and process engineering, mechanical engineering, product design, process optimization, simulation and industrial data management.
– development of custom applications and decision-support tools using openLCA as the LCA engine
– interoperability and exchange of data between openLCA and other platforms.
– case studies demonstrating reproducible or automated LCA workflows.

There is an extra session called “18 Sandbox session” that welcomes all other abstracts reltated to openLCA and LCA research.

Session Proposals Open

Is there an important aspect of LCA and sustainability you think should be discussed at openLCA.conf 2027? After the success of openLCA.conf 2026 we’re taking submissions again for topic, challenge and project sessions as well as panel discussions.

Submit your dream session by the 15th September 2026.

Topic Session

Different presentations over a common topic, e.g. agriculture, circular economy, construction, etc. The session can also be interactive with the audience.

Challenge Session

A session meant to be interactive in its core, bringing people together to explore, discuss and brainstorm a specific topic. The format can be mixed.

Project Session

Project sessions offer a platform for working teams such as research groups to present multiple aspects of their work within the same session. The session should be informative and can also be interactive.

Panel Discussion

Our panel sessions will bring together experts from across different fields to discuss and debate a wide range of topics. Audience engagement with the panel through Q&A is also encouraged.