This course will introduce you to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA ) methodology, a tool to assess the environmental impact of products and systems over the whole product life cycle, from cradle to grave.
After a discussion of the potentials and limitations of quantitative LCA compared to other assessment tools, we will detail and practice each of the LCA phases. 1) The goals and system definition phase defines the goal and scope of the study, including the product function, functional unit, and the product system and its boundaries. 2) The Life Cycle Inventory phase quantifies the inventory of the various elementary flows of resource extractions and substance emissions crossing the system boundary, providing an overview of existing databases. 3) The life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) phase determines multiple environmental impacts damage and provides an overview of the existing LCIA methods 4) The interpretation phase analyses results from an LCA case study to provide recommendations towards more sustainable products. Leading actions in several industrial sectors (agriculture and foods, automotive, personal care products, and energy) will be examined through relevant case studies in order to demonstrate how effective environmental life-cycle assessment leads to new product development.
CD
This course was very useful, but be aware that having access to EcoInvent License is necessary for using Open LCA software , or have a SimaPro license to complete the LCI, LCIA.
CM
Great foundational course. There is room for improvement, mainly in the content and use of LCA software. An updated version of the course would be great.
MF
This course is amazing. A course about LCA with direct-simulation is a must! Clearly delivered, easy to understand, and challenging assessment and tasks.
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This course was very useful, but be aware that having access to EcoInvent License is necessary for using Open LCA software , or have a SimaPro license to complete the LCI, LCIA.
No software teaching.
More information on software tools would be helpful
Great foundational course. There is room for improvement, mainly in the content and use of LCA software. An updated version of the course would be great.
The videos and materials provided by the course are interesting and useful, but the grading and evaluation processes are a mess. There's no indication on where to find the necessary data for the evaluation and the databases mentioned along the course are very expensive (thousands of dollars for a license). The evaluation is also dependent on peers-review which most of the times don't happen or are very inaccurate. Even along the graded quizzes per each module, random information is required to elaborate an answer which is not given in the question. It could be a very good course if it was not for the evaluation process and lack of explanation on how to find or process the data (which, in my opinion, is the most important topic when learning about LCAs...)
I found this course to be intersting and well organized for people who want to know about life cycle assesement. The practical examples illustrated are excellent and goes in hand with what you have learned in theory. I reccomned to anyone who is intersted in applying Life cycle asssement in their daily routine and also organizational presepctive.
This is the best LCA course I found online. I was able to full fill all the gaps in my knowledge regarding the LCA. As a personal who is very passionate about sustainability and LCA, I recommend this course to all the people who have a thurst to learn the fundamentals of LCA.
This course is amazing. A course about LCA with direct-simulation is a must! Clearly delivered, easy to understand, and challenging assessment and tasks.
This course has fundamentally shifted my professional perspective from viewing sustainability as a mere branding tool to recognizing it as a quantitative science essential for transparent marketing. My LCA research demonstrated that dairy milk has a 60% higher carbon footprint than almond milk (0.61 vs. 0.38 kg CO2eq), despite showing nearly identical energy consumption (~5 MJ), which challenges the common assumption that "plant-based" always equals lower energy. By integrating a 34% food loss factor and discovering that local sourcing can reduce emissions by 31%, I have gained the technical tools necessary at UPN to prevent greenwashing and provide rigorous, data-backed environmental claims. Although relying on global Ecoinvent data remains a limitation for the Peruvian context, this experience has provided a solid foundation for developing localized sustainable solutions in my future career.
Challenging but great course
Recommended!
Excellent
good
Pros: The course fundamental materials were good. Cons: The case study was discombobulated and not useful, and it didn't do enough LCA software tutorial.