This update is different – I am focusing on masters thesis projects. These babies are a great way for Swedish Life Cycle Center industrial partners and universities to interact. Industry folk get volunteers to look at core-business-adjacent questions, and learn something they do not have the time nor resources to find out directly. Along the way, industry folk get to meet some bright young students who have self-selected as being interested in their industry. You can get a much better idea about whether a student is worth recruiting than any number of job interviews allows. For academics it is a chance to find out what matters to industry and to access all the empirical benefits of research collaboration.

For most masters theses in Sweden, topics are adopted by students by the end of the calendar year and the real work gets done in the spring. Generally, the best students make their decisions first. So right now is a good time to bang out a 1-page proposal and find a friendly professor at a Swedish Life Cycle Center university to examine it. Often we will have some useful opinions about the proposal, so talk with us before publishing it. We might be able to help reach more students with it too.

If you want to learn things that have not yet made it through the journal publication pipeline, completed masters theses are worthwhile reading but a bit harder to locate than journal articles. Those from SLU can be accessed by the main Primo database but I found the Epsilon database to be more inclusive – if you searched on the 18th of August for “LCA” you would have found a crop of at least 5 LCA-related theses there from 2026. At KTH you want the Diva-portal. I found 8 from 2026 in a quick search. For LTU it is also the Diva-portal, where I found 4. Chalmers has its Open Digital Repository, I found 6 LCA theses there. A more detailed search in these places will find more theses and the numbers will naturally go up as the databases absorb the rest of the 2026 crop. On the other hand, some of the search engines also bring up 3 or 4 year bachelor theses when you look for masters products. It is a pity Diva does not cover all Swedish universities. If you do not mind having a lot of cookies and adverts on your computer there is also a consolidated repository at www.uppsatser.se. When I looked it had all of the KTH and LTU theses, half of SLU’s and none from Chalmers, but that was an artifact of a clunky search function (needing to drill into departments) rather than missing data.

Here are a couple of fresh theses on my radar to inspire you to collaborate. This year Swedish Life Cycle Center partners IVL and Chalmers worked with a company that makes train couplings on a masters thesis called “ProScale as a tool for organisational chemical footprint assessment: A case study of Dellner Couplers AB” . The company got insights that will aid management of its chemical inventory and the Swedish Life Cycle Center partners learned more about the strengths and development needs of the ProScale method, an approach which attempts to make data supply for chemical footprinting simpler than conventional LCA. On the other side of Sweden, SLU and KTH teamed up for “With or without pollination? Environmental impacts of Swedish beekeeping systems considering pollination services”. This had to deal with the fact that pollination is not a conventional “flow” and bees make honey in addition to having a percentual but significant yield-boosting effect on canola crops, but it depends on the cultivar… so this was a respectable methodological challenge!

Bottom line: bachelor and masters theses can be fun and generate valuable insights. So what do you want to learn next spring?