An Introduction to the industrial ecology tool of life cycle assessment.

Abstract

In this seminar Geoffrey Guest will provide an introduction to the industrial ecology tool of life cycle assessment. He will firstly present a brief overview of the concepts that have brought forth the field of industrial ecology. With several years of experience teaching the LCA course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), he will then provide listeners with both the basics of how an LCA is undertaken in addition to recent advances and direction into where the tool is going. As a current PhD candidate in Industrial Ecology Program at NTNU, he will also illustrate portions of his recent research on quantifying the climate change impacts due to biological carbon dynamics in bioenergy systems. Lastly, he will describe how LCA has been applied in some recent publications on coffee production and he will propose some approaches as to how LCA could be applied to regional coffee and restoration studies in futures studies