We welcome you to the third working group meeting of the year with the Circularity and life cycle assessment working group. In this meeting, researcher Tomas Ekvall will talk about how to model recycling in LCA.

Recycling can be modelled in many ways, although Frischknecht stated in 2010 that two methods dominate LCA practice: the cut-off approach and the end-of-life approach. This meeting starts with a presentation on how you can think when choosing how to model recycling in LCA. Then we want to know what approach(es) your organization uses. You can prepare for the meeting by considering the following questions:

• Do you use other methods than the cut-off or end-of-life? If so, what method(s)? When? And why?
• If and when you use the cut-off approach, how do you decide where to make the cut-off – i.e., when one product life cycle ends and the next starts?
• If and when you use the end-of-life approach, do you model the recycling as a closed loop where the recycled material returns to the same product life cycle? Or do you model open-loop recycling, where your recycled material substitutes primary material in another life cycle? Why?

If you are interested in learning more about how recycling can be modelled, you are welcome to join the meeting.

Agenda

• Welcome and introduction
• Presentation by Tomas Ekvall
• Discussion
• Updates from the Swedish Life Cycle Center
• Conclusion and next meeting

Read more about the working group

This meeting is coordinated within the project Innovation cluster for the life cycle perspective project. The project is funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and partners in the Swedish Life Cycle Center.