SETAC Europe Award for Lifetime Achievement in Life Cycle Assessment. The SETAC Europe Award for Lifetime Achievement in Life Cycle Assessment is conferred biannually by the SETAC Europe LCA Steering Committee. This award recognizes the outstanding contributions of individuals and/or organizations in promoting life cycle thinking and improving LCA approaches.
This year, the award was presented to Dr. Rolf Frischknecht, born on 17 August 1962, owner and managing director of treeze Ltd., a life cycle assessment consultancy located in Uster, Switzerland. Dr. Frischknecht is a civil engineer by formation and holds a Ph.D. in life cycle inventory analysis, both from ETH Zürich.
He is widely recognized for his outstanding contributions to life cycle inventory databases and methodology. He is especially known for his leading role from 1998 to 2008 in the design, development, implementation and operation of the life cycle inventory database ecoinvent laying a solid ground for its sustainable recognition and worldwide success.
His major methodological contributions cover allocation in joint production and recycling, decision oriented LCA, as well as key developments within the Ecological Scarcity Method, such as the first regionalised water scarcity indicator. In the context of planetary boundaries the Ecological Scarcity Method finds international recognition and has recently been adapted to the European Union and its member states.
In all his LCA related activities, Dr. Rolf Frischknecht makes sure that the models are sufficiently detailed and reliable to adequately describe reality and simple enough and scalable to be applied in LCA databases such as ecoinvent and in everyday LCA case studies. In his 30 years of LCI database management experience he coined the claim “trust in transparency” being convinced from the beginning that completely “open source” life cycle inventory data is one key prerequisite for true and fair life cycle assessments.
Sharing ideas and experiences and consensus finding are other affaires de coeur of Dr. Rolf Frischknecht. Together with his PhD colleagues at ETH he founded and launched the Clausius-talks in the early nineties to facilitate debates among Swiss LCA scientists. These talks were followed by the LCA forum series of events in 1996 addressing a growing and international audience; On 14 and 15 September 2020 the 75th Jubilee LCA forum of that series will be celebrated in Zürich! On the international stage, Dr. Rolf Frischknecht has since 2012 successfully chaired (together with Prof. Olivier Jolliet) the Life Cycle Initiative flagship project on Global Guidance for Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicators, which resulted in nine recommended harmonised life cycle impact assessment indicators.
On top of the many consulting and research activities, Dr. Rolf Frischknecht is teaching life cycle assessment to bachelor and master students at ETH Zürich and professionals in industry and administration since two decades. His teaching activities resulted in a textbook on Life Cycle Assessment (“Lehrbuch der Ökobilanzierung”) published with Springer Nature in 2020.
Dr. Rolf Frischknecht has been a member of the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment from 2000 to 2019, and subject editor for LCI methodology and databases from 2010 to 2019. Since 2015 he is honorary member of the ecoinvent association.
Throughout his professional career, Dr. Rolf Frischknecht dedicated his efforts to promote life cycle thinking and raise the awareness of environmental impacts hidden in the supply chains of products and services, and to lower the efforts in performing environmental life cycle assessment in environmentally crucial areas such as dwelling, mobility and food. By that he tries to contribute to the efforts of societies to lower their environmental footprints.
Dr. Frischknecht received the award during the SETAC Europe Annual meeting, 3-7 May 2020, Dublin (Ireland). The SETAC Europe Award for Life Time Achievement in Life Cycle Assessment is sponsored by Edana – the international association serving the nonwovens and related industries, www.edana.org.