Interpretation LIVE
The objective of this class is to provide students with expert guidance on carrying out the interpretation phase of an LCA, including instruction on the conceptual background and need for interpretation, review of the ISO guidelines and requirements for interpretation, practical methods and tools for interpretation, and helpful hints and strategies.
Delivery of the course material will be facilitated by a detailed case study of a comparative LCA which the instructor will use to illustrate key points and which the students will work with in practical exercises on interpretation.
The Interpretation phase of an LCA serves two purposes:
1) To gain insight so you can efficiently guide and refine the selected methodology and inventory model
2) To derive robust conclusions and well founded recommendations, as appropriate
This course presents the details of how to conduct an ISO compliant interpretation that meets all the required completeness, sensitivity and consistency checks. You will learn how to use contribution, scenario, uncertainty, and sensitivity analyses to conduct a fully detailed interpretation that will ensure your study results are robust and well-founded.
Medium: Online
Duration: Two three-hour sessions
Certificate: LCA Practitioner Certificate
Prerequisites:
- Introduction to LCA and SimaPro
- Impact Assessment Methods
- Modeling Recycling in LCA
- Familiarity with ISO 14040 and 14044 (2006) standards
- Completion of an LCA (internal screening level LCA is fine)
This is an advanced course designed for those participants who are actively working on LCAs.
Topics:
- Introduction to interpretation
- Sources of uncertainty & choices
- Goal of Interpretation in an LCA
- ISO 14044 (2006)
- Case study
- Evaluation
- Check the basic model
- Consistency check
- Data quality check
- Completeness check
- Sensitivity check
- Analysis tools
- Contribution (hot spot)
- Sensitivity
- Marginal
- Scenario (multivariate)
- Comparative
- Uncertainty
- Case study
- Conclusions
- Limitations
- Recommendations
Helpful Tips:
We recommend heading over to our course calendar and adding the respective course to you calendar.
The class will meet online on Zoom. Upon completion of course prework and signing the policy agreement, you will gain access to the Zoom, the course slide deck, and additional course content. We recommend using the course slide deck for note taking. These prove to be a great help when conducting your future LCAs.
The best set up for taking the class is to have one monitor to view the course slide deck and another running your LCA software tool to follow your instructor and gain hands on experience. If you would like to take the class but do not have access to software, we will provide you with a temporary SimaPro license.
