LCA for Infrastructure #2 - Hotspots & the Hard Data Choices

Session 1 covered the vocabulary. This one is for practitioners who already speak it: engineers and sustainability leads who've run an LCA before, or sat through Session 1, and are ready for the calls that actually move the needle.

Once you're past the definitions, the real difficulty starts. Where exactly do you draw the system boundary?

And what happens to a material like aggregate, whose own A1–A3 stages fold into the road system's A1?

What data do you actually trust for a given project phase: your own project data (foreground), or a database like ecoinvent, a national dataset, or an EPD (background)?

And once the assessment is done, where do the impacts really concentrate - which materials, which phases - and what do you do about it?

This session works through those questions in the order a real LCA forces you to answer them: scope, data, impact, and interpretation. We'll cover system boundaries, how foreground data availability changes across the phases of an infrastructure project, how to choose between EPDs, ecoinvent, and national databases for background data and emission factors, and how to read the result, spotting carbon hotspots by material and phase, and turning that into a reduction strategy rather than just a number.

💁 What you'll learn

• Goal and scope definition. Focus on system boundaries (A1-A3 of the aggregates system incorporated into A1 of the road system)
• Data collection (Life Cycle Inventory). Availability of project data (foreground data) based on the phases of the infrastructure project
• Impact assessment. More information about the sources of environmental data: ecoinvent, national databases, EPDs... Availability of carbon data (background data / Emission factors) based on the phases of the infrastructure project.
• Interpretation. Grasping the right orders of magnitude: where are the impacts? Which materials? Which phases? (= Carbon hotspots). Reduction strategies

👀 Who should attend

• Principal Engineer / Lead Engineer who has already run at least one LCA
• BIM Manager / BIM Lead working on carbon data integration
• Sustainability Manager / Carbon Manager past the fundamentals stage
• Anyone who attended Session 1 (Getting the Fundamentals Right) and wants to go further

☺️ Why are we giving this class for free?

At ORIS, our mission is to enable the construction sector to design inclusive, efficient, resilient, and low-carbon infrastructure projects by making the most of local resources and social and environmental data, connecting them through digital solutions.

We deeply believe in enabling those who design projects every day to better understand and act on LCA.