9:00 - 10:30 AM
Biogenic Carbon and Land Use Change in LCA: From Theory to Practice
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Biogenic carbon and land use change remain among the most important and controversial topics in life cycle assessment. Practitioners are increasingly expected to assess bio-based products, forestry systems, bioenergy, agriculture, carbon removals, and land-based mitigation measures, yet guidance remains fragmented across standards and methods.
This workshop provides a practical and technically rigorous introduction to the treatment of biogenic carbon, carbon storage, delayed emissions, land occupation and transformation, direct and indirect land use change, and avoided land use change in LCA. Participants will learn how different frameworks address these issues, including ISO standards, the GHG Protocol, EN 15804, Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), and current approaches used in environmental product declarations and carbon footprint studies.
The workshop will combine conceptual explanations with worked examples and hands-on exercises. Case studies will include applications to wood products, forestry residues, bioenergy systems, agricultural products, and bio-based construction materials. Particular attention will be given to common modelling errors, assumptions about "carbon neutrality," and the implications of different methodological choices for decision-making.
Methods and a Software Tool for Guiding Industry Transition to a Sustainable Circular Economy
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Guiding the transition to meet corporate goals such as sustainable circularity and net-zero emissions involves decisions in a complex and dynamic landscape of current and emerging technologies that operate within a global economy subject to changes in policies, geopolitics, and climate. Corporations that navigate this landscape well are likely to increase their profitability and market share while reducing their environmental impact and increasing the societal value of their activities.
This pre-conference workshop will introduce the challenges in identifying pathways and roadmaps for meeting these goals, describe the needed framework, and present a software tool for guiding the transition for chemical products. Participants will explore the Chemicals and Materials Industry (CMI) model, which includes material flow, energy use, and cost data for nearly 200 current processes and products, as well as approximately 200 emerging technologies.
The session will demonstrate how multiobjective optimization methods provide insight into tradeoffs between cost, circularity, and carbon footprints, and how the CMI software can support pathway development toward specific corporate goals.
Communicating Business Case for LCA / ROI Calculations
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This session will focus on how to communicate the business case for life cycle assessment and help senior stakeholders understand the value of investing in LCA work.
Participants will explore how to translate technical LCA outputs into practical business language, including return on investment, risk reduction, commercial value, stakeholder confidence, and strategic decision-making. The session is designed to help practitioners connect LCA work to organizational priorities and communicate why LCA matters beyond compliance or reporting.
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Alternative & Low Carbon Fuels: Regulatory Frameworks, LCA Methodology & Commercial Implications
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LCA practitioners with deep methodological expertise increasingly find themselves at the interface of their science and the policy and commercial worlds, where the rules are different. Regulatory programs for low carbon and alternative fuels do not simply apply standard ISO LCA: they mandate specific modeling frameworks, constrain boundary choices, prescribe allocation methods, and define credit-generating attributes in ways that diverge significantly from general LCA practice and from one another.
This advanced workshop is designed for LCA experts who already command the fundamentals and want to dig deeper into the regulatory layer: which frameworks apply to which programs, why modeling results differ across regulations for the same fuel pathway, and what those differences mean in a commercial project context. The session places particular emphasis on methodological tension, allocation approaches, co-product treatment, indirect effects, and attributional versus consequential framing across different regulatory frameworks.
Beyond Carbon Tunnel Vision: Understanding and Communicating Non-Climate LCA Indicators
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Life Cycle Assessment is increasingly used to inform decisions beyond climate change, yet non-carbon indicators such as toxicity, land use, water use and scarcity, and resource scarcity are often misunderstood or miscommunicated.
This workshop focuses on developing a deeper, practice-oriented understanding of what non-climate LCA indicators actually represent, where their strengths and limitations lie, and how they should and should not be used in decision-making and communication. Special attention will be given to toxicity and water-related indicators, as these are among the most frequently used and most commonly misinterpreted impact categories in practice.
Participants will explore causal chains behind impact categories, the role of models and assumptions, and common interpretation pitfalls. Through examples and practical guidance, the workshop will provide tools to contextualize results, explain them to non-experts, and avoid misleading comparisons.
AI in LCA Through an ISO Lens: Where It Fits, Where It Fails, and How Practitioners Should Govern It
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Artificial intelligence tools are entering LCA practice faster than the profession has developed guardrails for them. AI promises speed by automating inventory queries, generating emission factors, and synthesizing interpretation narratives in seconds. ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 demand something different: documented judgment, transparent assumptions, and defensible conclusions.
Using a phase-by-phase "Automation Map," participants will assess which stages of the LCA workflow are compatible with AI assistance and which are not. The workshop will examine risks around data provenance, allocation logic, black-box emission factors, hallucinated interpretation narratives, and undocumented methodological decisions.
Participants will leave with a reusable framework for evaluating AI tools against ISO requirements, a vocabulary for communicating AI-related limitations to clients and reviewers, and a governance checklist they can apply in their own practice.
When spend-based emissions factors aren't good enough: Bridging the gap between product LCA and organizational carbon footprinting in scope 3 assessments
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Scope 3 greenhouse gas accounting remains one of the most methodologically contested areas of corporate sustainability practice. Reporting organizations face a fundamental tension: product-oriented LCA and organizational carbon footprinting define system boundaries differently, employ distinct functional units, and often yield results that are difficult to reconcile.
This workshop addresses that tension directly by introducing hybrid-LCA frameworks, specifically path exchange methodologies, as a practical means of bridging the gap between product and organizational orientations in Scope 3 reporting. Participants will explore how hybrid-path emissions models integrate primary foreground data alongside EEIO, process-LCA, and company-reported data within a single modeling framework.
Particular attention will be given to reporting challenges under emerging frameworks such as CSRD, GHGP/ISO, ISSB, and SBTi, where granular, verifiable emissions data intensifies the need for methodological coherence.
2:00 - 5:00 PM
LCA 101
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This session will provide an overview of key concepts and methodologies of life cycle assessment according to the ISO 14040/14044 standards, covering the basic principles of goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory modeling, life cycle impact assessment, and interpretation.
It is geared toward students and professionals who are either starting out as practitioners or who will need to commission or evaluate LCA studies as part of their role.
Build an Explainable AI Agent for Product Carbon Footprinting: Matching Emission Factors, Defining Rules, and Auditing Results
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AI can accelerate LCA processes and carbon footprinting if it is transparent, constrained, and auditable. This hands-on workshop teaches participants how to design and prototype their own AI agent that calculates the carbon footprint of a component, product, or activity by matching items to an emission factor database, applying user-defined calculation logic and constraints, and generating an explanation trail that enables verification and improvement.
Participants will work through an end-to-end workflow, including structuring input descriptions, defining mapping strategies to emission factor libraries, implementing calculation rules, and configuring traceable outputs. A key emphasis is "human-in-the-loop" practice: participants will learn how to set guardrails so the agent asks for missing information, avoids unsupported extrapolation, and documents limitations rather than inventing answers.
By the end of the session, attendees will have a reusable template for an explainable carbon-footprinting agent that can be adapted to their organization's data sources, preferred standards, and reporting needs.
The Future of EPD Development: Digital Tools Unlock Quality at Scale
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The popularity of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) is rising, driven by procurement requirements, green building standards, and increasing demand for supply chain transparency. Yet EPD development has changed very little. The workflow remains largely manual, slow, expensive, and difficult to scale.
This workshop explores how advances in technology and data infrastructure are creating opportunities to streamline EPD development and verification while maintaining quality and reliability. Participants will examine digital EPDs, machine-readable data, platform interoperability, parametric LCA modeling, scaling factors, and AI tooling that supports practitioners across the LCA workflow.
Throughout the session, participants will be invited to share their biggest frustrations and bottlenecks in EPD development. Attendees will leave having seen real tools and approaches in action, better equipped to streamline their own EPD work, drive clarity in conversations with customers, and offer more value.
