An introduction to Brightway 2

[!IMPORTANT]

1. Works really only for Brigthway 2, not Brightway 2.5. I might write an update some time, perhaps when Brightway 3 is out 😉
2. This repository has not been maintained since Nov 2019, in part because I have moved my focus elsewhere and in part because I had lost access to the previous account where this repo was stored. Apologies to those who have posted issues since then; however, having now access to the repo again on my current account does not mean that I will engage in issue-solving. Sorry again! 🙃

Brightway is a Python-based free and open-source software for lifecycle assessment (LCA; see here for a recent good overview, also accessible via LinkedIn).

LCA is a tool used for analysing the environmental (and other) pressures associated with products, technologies, and countries. This may sound a little big, but it's all just a matter of which database you use. Commonly, the term LCA is understood in its process-based variant where its application is bound to comparative and hotspot analysis. That is, LCAs are performed for individual products like shopping bags to figure out if a cotton-based one is more environmentally-friendly (and where along its supply chain) than a single-use plastic one (see for example this study), or similarly with single-use vs reusable food packaging (see for example this study). They may also be performed for product fleets such as this (Brightway-based) one on wind turbines in Denmark. The mathematics of LCA are, however, derived from the field of input-output economics which has a history dating back more than a hundred years. IO-based LCA is used for calculating environmental footprints of regions and their citizens (see for example here for an overview of its applications and here for an overview of footprints). Popular databases for process-based and IO-based LCA are, respectively, ecoinvent and EXIOBASE. The focus of Brightway has typically been process-based LCA.

This repo contains two files: a Jupyter notebook and a spreadsheet that is used at one point in that notebook. The notebook is long, really long. So be ready for spending some time here! And have fun 😉

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.