The 2017 ALCAS Symposium was held at North Stradbroke Island in Queensland in November. The LCA symposium highlighted advancements in LCA theory and practice in Australia.
The conference brought together the two branches of LCA - environmental extended input output (EEIO)LCA and bottom up unit process LCA. Participants got to see a wide variety of research and commercial application of LCA.
The keynote address by Khanh Hoang from the Australian Bureau of Statistics emphasised the history of ABS in providing data to support decision making. The ABS are now starting to produce physical environmental accounts as well as the economic accounts which form the basis for EEIO.
There were presentations from students and LCA professional across different sectors and topics including transport, buildings, agriculture and food. There was also examples of innovative approaches to combine EEIO with AusLCI in hybrid LCA models.
Barney Foran challenged conference delegates in his opening and closing keynotes to answer the big picture questions on sustainability, in particular those relating to the problems of consumption in modern day economies.
Special mention goes to the Best Student Presentation Prize, awarded to Chanjief Chandrakumar, Doctoral Research Scholar at New Zealand Life Cycle Management Centre. Special thanks to ALCAS corporate member The Footprint Company for sponsoring the award.
Thanks to our great colleagues at the Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) for co-hosting our Symposium with your Conference. It was great to meet, learn and share ideas to bring the input-output modelling and LCA closer together.