2.-0 LCA consultants

Page last updated

August 07, 2011
by Bo Weidema

Education and courses - building your own capacity

We offer post-graduate education and courses on demand. A number of standard course templates are shown here, but will of course be tailored to your specific needs.

Learning LCA in 3 days

This is our crash-course for newcomers to the life cycle world. In a combination of lectures, group-work and computer-exercises (involving your own products) we give you the most up-to-date tools to get started. This is equivalent to what the students learn in a semester at the leading universities.

Courses on demand:

You determine when, where and content: You have the option to have a taylor made LCA course. This includes that you can choose topics to be covered, e.g.:

You can also choose sector specific topics to be covered such as modelling of agricultural systems, waste management systems/recycling, energy systems, pulp and paper etc.

The price is 1000 EUR per person per day + transport and accomodation for the teacher. For a course with four or more participants, we pay for the teacher's transport and accomodation.

We determine when and where: At irregular intervals we provide general training courses. Here we cover a selected number of the above topics. You are welcome suggesting when and where for the next course. The price is 500 EUR per person per day.

Example of a one-day introduction course:

Consequential LCA - myths and reality

An introduction to the methodology along with the knowledge to manage and communicate projects and interpret reports

Example of a two-day hands-on course:

Consequential LCA - hands on
2-days course to provide participants with the knowledge to perform a consequential LCA study

1) General overview of the differences between attributional and consequential LCA, including some historical notes.
2) Defining the product and its functional unit - The market-based approach
3) Linking activities in a supply chain (by identifying those that are affected and excluding the constrained suppliers)
a) Scale and time horizon
b) Market delimitation
c) Market trends
d) Constrained markets
4) Co-production
a) Combined production
b) Joint production: What is the determining product?
c) Joint production: Is the dependent product fully utilised?
d) Comparison to allocation: Full preservation of mass and substance balances
e) Situations with two or more determining products
f) Speciality products
g) Substitution between unequal products

Doing your own LCA in 2 months

Learning by doing - including the above 3-days course for a starter - followed by your own data collection, with assistance from our consultants, a half-way session to share experiences and discuss and straighten out any problems, more homework with a hot-line to our consultants, and finally a 3-days session ending in the exam: presenting the results so even your CEO can understand it.

An example of such capacity building, with a special eco-design component, is our project with the Electrical and Electronics Institute of Thailand.

Workplace learning

Decisions that affect the environment are made at many different levels in a company, and environmental training should therefore not be reserved for the personnel with explicit responsibility for environmental issues.

Compared to external training, workplace training provides better opportunities for integrating direct experience and real life experimentation into the training situation. Furthermore, it becomes possible to embed the training results immediately in the work situation. Beside these pedagogical advantages, workplace training can more easily be adjusted to the pace of the individual employee and to the pace of the work situation, e.g. utilising periods of downtime. We assist in designing workplace curricula where training is systematically planned as part of the work processes.

An example is our environmental management module, offered as on-job training for groups of employees with different job functions in the same company or product chain features group exercises in which the employees play the same roles as in their normal job situation, and learn to understand their own role in the larger company and/or product chain context, as well as the roles, cultures, tools and languages of the other participants. The training is centred on the understanding that all actors share the same objective, in the form of the product output, but have different viewpoints, cultures and languages with which to address it. The group exercises engage the employees in assisting each other to improve their mutual performance, identifying bottlenecks, removing friction, and adjusting procedures to optimize the value chain of the product they have in common.

See also our page on employee participation and environmental training.

We are an active partner in TENVORS (Trans-European Network on Lifelong Vocational Learning for Sustainable Regional Development) and involved in several projects that develop training materials for specific purposes, such as:

Web-based learning

Our approach to web-based learning takes full advantage of the interactive options of the Internet. See some example exercises demonstrating our approach (note that these exercises are individual examples and do not provide any coherent training programme). Currently, courses are not provided for the general public, but specific courses are developed on demand. We develop training modules on environmental issues in general and on LCA and product related issues in particular.

Ph.D. courses

Our senior staff members teach at leading universities. For the advanced student or employee, we are involved in organising annual Ph.D. courses in co-operation with Aalborg University, the topics covering Consequential modelling in LCI, IO-modelling, and indirect land use changes. The course in 2011 took place 10-12th May. Requests on the date of the next couse in 2012 can be sent to Jannick H Schmidt (js followed by @lca-net.com).

Individual courses can be arranged.