News

Review of three recent textbooks on LCA

October 11, 2019 by ILCA

The ILCA Academy members strive to review and recommend available teaching materials. With the aim of a stringent approach a set of criteria for a good beginner’s LCA textbook has therefore been developed.

These criteria have been used to review three recent textbooks on LCA:

  • Jolliet O, Saadé-Sbeih M, Shaked S, Jolliet A, Crettaz P. (2016). Environmental Life Cycle Assessment. Boca Raton: CRC Press
  • Matthews H S, Hendrickson C T, Matthews D H. (2016): Life Cycle Assessment: Quantitative Approaches for Decisions That Matter – lcatextbook.com
  • Hauschild M Z, Rosenbaum R K, Olsen S I (Eds.). (2018). Life Cycle Assessment: Theory and Practice. Heidelberg:Springer. (link)

A summary of the first part of the review has now been published in Journal of Industrial Ecology. For each of these three, more detailed comments are available in the following files:

Review details Jolliet
Review details Matthews
Review details Hauschild

And the winners are…..

September 2, 2019 by Inger Weidema

Today the three winners of the 2019 International Life Cycle Academy Awards were revealed at a small ceremony at the LCM 2019.

Hearty congratulations to everybody!

Autumn courses at ILCA

August 29, 2019 by Inger Weidema

Today there is only one month left to register for the autumn courses at the International Life Cycle Academy.

We are also happy to announce, that the teaching staff for our LCIA courses will be joined by Laure Patouillard this year. Laure is Scientific coordinator at CIRAIG and has been responsible for the implementation of the IMPACT World+ method into the Brightway LCA software. We look very much forward this new edition of the LCIA suite. https://ilca.es/courses/courses/

A historic exercise book

August 20, 2019 by Bo Weidema

References to my ‘ancient’ 1994 exercise book come up from time to time. Therefore we have today decided to share a simple scan of this book, to make it available for discussion within the LCA community. Someone might take inspiration for an updated version with modern LCA techniques?

The book contains two fictional LCA reports on baby diapers, which make use of the same data, interpreting these differently. This causes diverging results. The book was intended to allow students to discover by themselves the implications of certain methodological choices or assumptions.

The book is very outdated in many respects (eg. the impact assessment methodologies and the state of data gathering and interpretation). But the overall teaching methodology seems to be still valid. Nothing like ‘walking the talk’ to improve learning. This is even to this day our concept at International Life Cycle Academy.

Two fictional life cycle assessments 1994 (pdf, 30 MB)