In December 2017, ISO published two new documents that will be of interest to ALCAS members. The first is an amendment to the core LCA standard 14044:2006. Amendment 1 expands the scope of ISO 14044 to cover the quantification of footprints, and adds two new definitions: “footprint” and “area of concern”. Aspect-specific documents exist to cover the quantification of carbon footprints (ISO/TS14067) and water footprints (ISO14046). With the amendment to ISO14044 now published,

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 emphasis

The committee are starting planning now for the next ALCAS conference scheduled for early 2019. We need you! We are assembling a conference committee working group of ALCAS members. Our objective is to bring together the best ideas and contributions to deliver a stimulating and developing conference. Anyone interested in volunteering in any capacity is asked to contact Jonas Bengtsson by 4 January. A kick off meeting is planned for early 2018. #ALCAS #Volunteer #Committee

The ALCAS Board has signed off on the development of a Certification for LCA Executives in Australia and New Zealand. The program is expected to mirror the US certification available from the Amercian Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA). Certification will demonstrate that the individual understands the basics of LCA and can interpret and communicate LCA results to the general public. This is not aimed at practitioners and will not test an individual’s ability to perfo

Apologies to people struggling with the ALCAS website which was damaged by a cyber-attack and had to be reconstructed. Most of this is back up and running and is now cleaner and more user friendly. There are some minor fixes still being made to the AusLCI site which is now hosted at auslci.com.au. These fixes will include better display of the datasets with background parameters to be included. #ALCAS #website