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<div class="csl-entry">Köck, B., & Mihalyi-Schneider, B. (2025, June 16). <i>Automated Life-Cycle Assessment Pipeline for Sustainable University Procurement: Concept and Pilot at TU Wien</i> [Conference Presentation]. 1st LCA–Symposium at TU Wien, Wien, Austria. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12708/228072</div>
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12708/228072
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Book of Abstracts: https://lca.conf.tuwien.ac.at/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/lca-symposium-tuw-2025-book-of-abstracts-2.pdf
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dc.description.abstract
The public procurement of large universities is a powerful yet under-utilised lever for climate-mitigation and broader environmental gains. Launching in May 2025, the LCA@TUW pilot will test the degree to which environmental assessment of purchased goods can be automated inside TU Wien’s operational information landscape. Two contrasting product families—office supplies and laboratory chemicals—have been selected because they exhibit divergent material compositions, risk profiles and data availability. Together, they represent a substantial share of the university’s annual purchasing footprint.
The proposed framework couples enterprise-resource-planning (SAP) and warehouse databases (SQL) with the commercial LCA platform Makersite via a four-stage pipeline: (i) establishment of an automated data extraction, cleaning and taxonomic harmonisation, including OCR of delivery notes; investigation and expansion with further TU databases (ii) AI-assisted product classification and life-cycle-inventory (LCI) proxy matching through Makersite’s Intelligent BOM Importer and AI Mapping Engine; (iii) parametrised cradle-to-grave modelling with the Environmental Footprint 3.0 impact method and selected scenario analysis covering alternative suppliers, materials and end-of-life routes; (iv) bidirectional exchange of impact results and data-quality scores with the TU data warehouse to feed Power BI dashboards and enable continuous monitoring.
A mixed quantitative–qualitative evaluation will track reduction in analyst effort, LCI-coverage ratio, uncertainty envelopes and decision usefulness for procurement. The study will also catalogue systemic obstacles—including missing material declarations, heterogeneous nomenclatures, missing CAS numbers, and the inherent difficulty of gathering reliable data for the use and end-of-life phases of products—and propose mitigation pathways that balance automation with targeted manual review.
Expected outputs include a TU wide accessible process manual, a governance playbook for scaling to further product categories, and baseline impact metrics for TU Wien. By documenting both opportunities and pain points, LCA@TUW aims to provide a transferable blueprint for universities and other contracting authorities seeking to embed life-cycle thinking in routine purchasing while complying with Austrian naBe guidelines and EU Green Public Procurement criteria.
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en
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dc.subject
Sustainable procurement
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Life Cycle Assessment
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data pipeline
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Nachhaltige Beschaffung
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Ökobilanz
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Scope 3
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Automatisierung
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Large Language Models
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LLM
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dc.title
Automated Life-Cycle Assessment Pipeline for Sustainable University Procurement: Concept and Pilot at TU Wien
