Suggestions for improvements or new content are welcome! There is no exam for this course and no certificate of participation. I don't have the capacity for individual supervision and guidance and will decline such requests unless they are related to mistakes in the material or parts of it that are confusing. The course and its parts are designed for self-study. It can be used in own teaching, modified and expanded. Most of the material is made available under a Creative Commons Licence. The course material will be improved and expanded over the next years, so that the syllabus can grow bit by bit. If you would like to see your own content added, drop a line to, and I will check whether it fits into the course. If you would like to have a link removed, let me know. I took the liberty of linking to content created by other scholars of the industrial ecology and other communities where appropriate. The course consists of a combination of own and external material. For some exercises reading material that is not generally available is required. The more advanced parts make use of the programming language Python via Jupyter notebooks, and some of the LCA exercises use openLCA in connection with the ecoinvent life cycle database.
#OPENLCA IMPORT IMPACT ASSESSMENT METHODS PDF#
For the basic parts of the course a pdf reader, Excel or a similar spreadsheet tool, and access to Youtube are sufficient. The course is built using freely available tools and data wherever possible. For each course item a quick summary of the content is provided, the prerequisites are stated, and the level of difficulty is indicated on a scale reaching from (+) (not very difficult) to (+++) (rather difficult). To grasp the content of the application section some familiarity with the industrial ecology methods is necessary. For fully appreciating the origin, structure, and interrelation of the different industrial ecology methods, however, some extra work with the background material will be helpful. Readers can choose their preferred level of exposure to conceptual foundations, and can jump to the methods section, which also contains most of the exercises, at any point.
In the application section a number of selected case studies and other examples are presented. In the methods section the core industrial ecology methods material flow analysis, life cycle assessment, and input-output analysis are introduced. In the background section a general introduction to the topic is given and the theoretical foundations of interdisciplinary systems science in general, and industrial ecology in particular, are laid. The course is divided into three broad sections: background, methods, and applications.
There are now more than 40 exercises and tutorials, and these form the core of this course.
#OPENLCA IMPORT IMPACT ASSESSMENT METHODS CODE#
It features the following items, which are freely available for educational use: lectures (screencasts and webinars of 15-60 minutes), exercises with sample solutions, code samples or notebooks, and reading material (papers, essays, reports, blog entries). The course was developed for university students. Second, to guide new industrial ecology researchers towards having fun and impact with properly conducted science for sustainability. It has two purposes: First, to document and explain some of the ‘soft’ knowledge around industrial ecology concepts, methods, data, and applications that is needed to conduct state-of-the-art industrial ecology research. The Industrial Ecology Open Online Course (IEooc) is a collection of web content on industrial ecology background, methods, and applications.