Purdue SEE Students, Alumni, and Faculty Attend the 2025 ACLCA Conference
The Purdue School of Sustainability Engineering and Environmental Engineering (SEE) celebrated growth, connection, and collaboration at the 2025 American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA) Conference.
The conference invited attendees to transform ideas into “actionable sustainability solutions,” and take a deep dive into Life Cycle Assessment with a community of sustainability leaders. Several leaders in SEE came together for this important effort to create actionable strategies in sustainability work.
Dr. Heather Liddell, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Environmental & Ecological Engineering in Purdue University’s Schools of SEE and Mechanical Engineering attended along with SEE PhD students Heyichen Xu (Liddell group) and Yiming Liu (Cai group) and SEE postdoc S.M. Mizanur (“Mizan”) Rahman (Zhao group). Purdue alumni at the meeting included Jue Mo (now at University of Washington), Yongxian Zhu (now at Argonne National Laboratory), and Tai-Yuan Huang (now at University of California - Berkeley).
Both Dr. Liddell and Heyichen Xu were honored with awards at the conference: Dr. Liddell received the 2025 ACLCA Michael Levy Rising Star Award and Heyichen Xu earned first place in the ACLCA student poster competition. As conference volunteers, SEE graduate students Yiming Liu and Heyichen Xu also provided active leadership by chairing technical sessions and coordinating conference logistics throughout the meeting.
“ACLCA's annual conference draws about 350 attendees from industry, academia, and government to discuss research results, industry innovations, and trends in the science/policy landscape related to the practice of environmental life cycle assessment (LCA),” said Dr. Liddell.
“LCA is a systematic method used to assess the potential environmental impacts of a product throughout its life cycle, including greenhouse gas emissions, human toxicity, ecosystem effects, and even social impacts like employment and community wellbeing. Something that makes the ACLCA conference special is its deliberate emphasis on engaged participation throughout the meeting. In addition to traditional technical sessions, the meeting incorporates workshop-style sessions such as the interactive Challenge Session. These sessions are designed to harness the community’s collective expertise to tackle difficult questions and controversial topics. ACLCA also welcomes newcomers through a dedicated “LCA Institute” (educational) conference track and a student volunteer program.”
Dr. Liddell shared that AI and automation were significant topics of discussion at the conference this year.
“AI-assisted LCA can help us scale analysis—but a barrier is the significant reliance of traditional LCA on human judgment for assumptions and data selection,” Dr. Liddell elaborated.
“AI tools may not be able to replicate expert intuition automatically. This prompted some other questions: could over-reliance on intuition have some downsides even for humans? Different LCA practitioners typically get very different results. Our research group has been grappling with similar questions recently, so these conference discussions resonated and will re-invigorate our work on assurance of LCA data quality and assumption validity.”
Strong SEE attendance at the conference created vital opportunities for innovation. Dr. Liddell highlighted:
“This conference has consistently strong participation by industry, with industry stakeholders typically making up more than half of the conference attendance. Conversations with industry professionals provide essential context to inform SEE research. To maximize relevance and impact, it’s essential for us to step back, ask questions, and seek to understand how the research directions we pursue resonate with industry stakeholders—and ACLCA provides a great environment to do that. Incorporating these real-world perspectives helps us avoid ‘ivory tower’ pitfalls and focus on challenges that truly matter.”
For more information about Purdue’s School of Sustainability Engineering and Environmental Engineering, please visit: https://engineering.purdue.edu/SEE.