Blog archive: August 2026

Call for Proposals: Publicly Available Advanced Case Studies for Teaching LCA Concepts

August 25, 2026 by ILCA

The International Life Cycle Academy (ILCA) seeks proposals from interested parties to produce and deliver a case study as a tutorial or exercise that can be used in an LCA course setting (e.g., as materials used or assigned by an instructor). Completed case studies will be made available for teaching across the globe.

We anticipate funding available for at most two projects, each with a budget of no more than 7500 EUR. We also expect that materials would be available with Creative Commons “CC-BY” license, and in English language (and have the creator’s permission to, if desired, translate it to other languages without additional fee). If the materials are provided under these conditions, we will accept that the materials include previously published material.

At a high-level, a successful individual case study produced for this call would be able to be used across a range of learning or course scenarios. For example, the first part of a delivered case study could focus on a relatively straightforward, easy-to-follow product system and LCI, and subsequent parts could add complexity to the initial system via additional market constraints or requirements on the functional unit.

While there is no specific format requested for the case study, given the “course usage” motivation for this request, it is hoped that there are useful pedagogical constructions within the case study, as illustrated by these examples (for inspiration):

• A fully developed case study/exercise as an “answer key” for an instructor, augmented with questions to be answered along the way by students to get to the fully developed answer. When implemented, a case study like this could be revisited across the course of a semester.
• A “find the errors” type exercise where two parallel case studies are delivered and the intention is for students to identify the problems or errors in each, in order to create a single error-free result.

At a more detailed level, we would hope that as many as possible of the following “included aspects” in the (advanced) case studies:

• Setting of goal and scope, including the core distinctions of average versus marginal modelling
• Functional unit, including the conditions for substitution
• Documentation for data collection for foreground unit processes
• Spreadsheet matrix of the full LCI (with no concerns for use of proprietary data)
• Relation between application and impact categories, and limitations in application when relevant impacts are excluded (including social issues)
• Reproducible inventory calculus documentation
• Completeness of product system by combining process-based foreground and IO-based background data
• Use of market datasets (cf. ecoinvent)
• Using subdivision to handle combined production and substitution to handle joint production
• Treatment of rebound effects
• Temporal differentiation of emissions (e.g., by going beyond the assumption of neutrality of biogenic CO2-emissions)
• Life Cycle Impact Assessment using impact pathways (cause-effect chains, environmental mechanisms)
• Weighting and its justification (also for normalisation, if applied)
• Mass balancing for quality assessment in both inventory and impact assessment

In response to this call, ILCA seeks maximum 4-page summaries describing the intended product system(s) used, public data sources used, format of case study, included aspects, past relevant experience of the applicant, and expected delivery date.

For this opportunity, we anticipate a “hands on” relationship between ILCA and the case study developer. ILCA would provide initial comments on a proposed case study and would request periodic updates to iterate on interim progress before completion. This would be done in order to maximize the utility of the case study for implementation in a wide variety of audiences.

Criteria for Evaluation:

• Applicability of chosen product system to a broad global audience
• Appropriateness of intended learning objectives and pedagogical construction of the case study
• Appropriateness and degree of detail of the included aspects, as per the above list
• Past record of development of educational resources (even if not widely disseminated/published)
• Timeline for completion

Send your submissions to us here: info@ilca.es

Deadline: 31 October 2026.