It was exciting to teach a room packed with the next generation of LCA experts from three Scandinavian countries at the Swedish Life Cycle Center’s national “Advances in LCA” course. This intensive course is for PhD-students and industry folk, all of whom are already working with LCA. An international cast of teachers takes them to research frontiers in prospective methods, life cycle impact assessment, AI and beyond. After weeks at Chalmers and online, there is a final week in the real at SLU next week. Delivering this course is one of the key items in the Swedish Life Cycle Center Research Strategy for fomenting cutting-edge work in Sweden.

Recent investments in Swedish life cycle research are apparent in papers published by Swedish Life Cycle Center partners this year. Liv Lundberg (RISE) and Tomas Kåberger (Chalmers) collaborated with Osaka Sangyo University to publish an analysis of what happens when energy supply subsidy schemes are poorly designed. Using a Japanese example, they showed how the levelized cost of energy (similar to a life cycle cost per kilowatt hour) was driven up by 0.16 yen for every 1 yen of feed-in tariff in the subsidy scheme. There are probably some lessons for Swedish nuclear power subsidy schemes here.

Gustav Sandin, Matilda Lidfeldt and Maja Nellström (all at IVL) published an assessment of the benefits of textile recycling in Europe. Focusing on climate and water impacts and confronting the Recycling Numbercruncher’s Nemesis (i.e. the replacement rate question), they decided to get a grip on the statistical likelihood of improvements using Monte Carlo simulation. In their main case, the replacement rate needs to be 44 % or better for the climate to benefit.

Lignin fibres strongly outperformed polyacrylonitrile for wind turbine blades in a recent study published by Ulrika Rova, Paul Christakopoulos and Leonidas Matsakas from LTU, in collaboration with Dalia Yacout (SLU) and colleagues from Umeå. This outperformance occurred in 9 out of 10 impact categories and survived the shorter lifespan of the natural materials – a pretty strong showing for any comparative LCA.

Anna Björklund and Rajib Sinha (KTH) polished off their series of publications with Asterios Papageorgiou on circularity in Umeå with a paper in which materials flux analysis and LCA were integrated along with circularity indicators. Applied at the municipal level, this generated some useful sustainability and circularity policy feedback for the city.

With some colleagues from Namibia and Thailand, SLU folk Joseph Pechsiri, Rosa Goodman, Cecilia Sundberg and Niclas Ericsson published an application of machine learning for defining the goal and scope of an LCA. In particular, they used natural language processing to determine the impact categories for LCA on biomass systems. It’s a lot more complicated than just asking ChatGPT, and did not save time but did improve the level of detail in the outcomes, and would probably save time in work based on larger datasets.

If in the next Scientific Directions Update you would like to draw attention to some progress which researchers at your Swedish Life Cycle Center partner organisation are making, please feel free to contact me: [email protected].