That question followed Max Krichenbauer through four days at the Life Cycle Summer School 2026 in Malmö, Sweden (August 26–29), organized by FSLCI and hosted by IVL Svenska Miljöinstitutet.
This year's theme "Designing Solutions vs. Shifting the Problem" put a name on something that shapes a lot of sustainability work: an intervention can succeed locally and still push its impacts somewhere else. Into another life cycle stage, another sector, a distant geography, or simply into the future.
Four days of prospective and transition LCA, systems thinking, rebound effects and technological lock-in, life cycle costing, Social LCA, spill over effects and LCM in public administration. Each lecture was followed by a workshop that forced us to apply it immediately. The site visit to Varvsstaden, the transformed Kockums shipyard, showed impressively how S-LCA can help decision-makers identify the right solution.
What Max Krichenbauer found most valuable was the part that usually gets least attention: what happens after the LCA. The interpretation phase, and everything that follows once results leave the model.
LCM turned out to be less a single method than a toolbox — prospective LCA, life cycle costing, S-LCA, technology readiness assessment, stakeholder mapping (just to name some of them). Each answers a different question, each has its own blind spots, and the skill lies in knowing which combination fits the decision at hand and how the tools feed into one another.
Seeing that chain end to end made something clear that is easy to take for granted: everything downstream rests on the data underneath. The inventory determines the results, the results shape the interpretation, and the interpretation is what eventually informs strategy, investment or policy. A weak data basis doesn't stay a methodological detail, it propagates into decisions that get locked into for decades. Which is exactly why inventory data matters so much, and why our research focuses on making it more robust, transparent and context-appropriate.
Thank you to Philip Strothmann and Sashank Kumar for the organization, and to Fritz Balkau, Guido Sonnemann, Prasad Modak, Johanna Olofsson, Anne Ventura, Romain Sacchi, Georgios Manthos, Christian Björneland, Bojana Petrovic, Nilay Elginöz, Tomas Rydberg, Max Åhman and Mark Radka — and to the other participants.
Max Krichenbauer's participation was supported by the DFG-funded project CE4NWS (FIP 151/1, project number 549138046): https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/549138046
Left Malmö with a better understanding for designing solutions.
