Organised by ecoinvent, Quantis, the National Cleaner Production Centre of South Africa and the University of Cape Town, the workshops and trainings will take place in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town from May 23rd to May 27th, with tailored aims and formats to suit a wide range of audience, from business and policy leaders to LCA practitioners. These workshops are free of charge, but the number of participants is limited. Please, register for the workshops according to your profile.

Calendar and Profile

Workshops Description

Join us to learn, share and discuss the added value sustainability assessment can create for policy makers and companies.

Governments need to take action on critical environmental issues. But what tools are available to get a more profound understanding of the challenges ahead? At the same time, success stories show that sustainability is a business game-changer. Learn how companies are now embedding life cycle thinking in order to measure, understand, manage and communicate their sustainability performance.

The session is targeted towards sustainability managers and decision makers from the private sector as well as from the government, who want to learn, share and discuss about how to create value from sustainability assessments beyond reporting.

Topics:

• What is life cycle thinking?
• How to measure the environmental footprint along the full value chain?
• What are the current LCA activities in South Africa and what are the planned ecoinvent activities?
• Lessons learned from leaders: how companies in South Africa integrate life cycle thinking into their sustainability strategy?
• How to communicate your environmental performance?
• Why regional data are important to capture supply chain impacts?

Available venues and dates:

• Pretoria, May 23^rd 2016 (full day), CSIR, Knowledge Commons (Building 50), Meiring Naude Road, Brummeria, Pretoria (CSIR map)
• Cape Town, May 26^th 2016 (full day) – Belmont Square, Belmont Road, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7700

Join us to learn about opportunities for contributing to the development of a South African LCI database in collaboration with ecoinvent and how to model and submit data to the database with the ecoEditor tool.

This workshop is dedicated to LCA practitioners who are interested in contributing to the development of a South African life cycle inventory (LCI) database and in LCI data collection activities with ecoinvent. The workshop provides an introduction to ecoinvent’s data collection activities in South Africa and a hands-on training on how to collect, calculate and successfully submit data to the database with the ecoEditor tool.

Topics - Introduction:

• What are the planned ecoinvent data collection activities and how can you get involved?
• What is the good practice of life cycle inventory data and modelling?
• How to collect and calculate life cycle inventory data?
• How to successfully submit data to the ecoinvent database - Step-by-step training, incl. theory & practice
• Tips and tricks on the ecoEditor

Available venues and dates:

• Johannesburg, May 24^th 2016 (full day) - The Kerzner Building; School of Tourism and Hospitality (STH), Bunting Road campus of the University of Johannesburg

• Cape Town, May 27^th 2016 (full day) – Studio 1, Chemical Engineering building, University of Cape Town Upper Campus

Growing awareness and concern about the environment are triggering action towards sustainable development models. This requires policy makers to take decisions which promote sustainability, companies to optimize their production chains from the environmental point of view, and calls for environmental experts to find solutions to analyse, quantify and reduce the environmental impacts of products or complex systems.

ecoinvent has partnered with Quantis, the National Cleaner Production Centre of South Africa and the University of Cape Town to conduct a series of workshops to promote life cycle thinking among business and policy leaders and empower them on sustainability issues, and also provide a platform to offer hands-on training for South African LCA experts who would like to contribute to ecoinvent and the South African LCI database.

The training activities in South Africa are part of the SRI program funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).

The workshop series is linked to ecoinvent data collection activities, with the main objective to build freely available and regionalised inventory data for emerging economies. More information about the ecoinvent project.

If you would like to know more about the ecoinvent capacity building workshop series in South Africa, please contact Andrea Del Duce from Quantis Switzerland. For more information about ecoinvent's training and data collection activities in South Africa, India and Latin America please contact ecoinvent.