The European aeronautics industry has a large environmental and socio-economic relevance. Its sustainability, productivity and competitiveness will strongly depend on the innovation steps to make economic value and ecologic value come together. Looking at aviation as circular economy, all life cycle phases must be considered closing the loop from end-of-life to material production.

Engineering for Sustainability of materials, processes and resources, efficient manufacturing, lifetime services and the end-of-life challenge will drive the competitive value in the context of environmental services. The two thematic sessions provide an overview about the ecoDESIGN Transversal Activity in the Clean Sky 2 programme. This includes an outlook on selected activity domains and demonstrations in scope.

It includes as well a critical review of life cycle assessments of aviation systems and indicators to support circular economy implementation in airports.

Aviation is undergoing an epochal transformation towards becoming sustainable and achieving climate neutrality in 2050. But how to measure sustainability? How to measure if innovative solutions are sustainable or not? 
A valuable tool to answer those questions is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Currently LCA is used in many projects and applied for many different cases. Though codified in ISO standards, the various projects use LCA data and assumptions in different ways. Also, LCA focuses on specific impact categories, but it is unclear whether those are relevant for aviation. Last, it is not yet clear whether LCAs would be sufficient to measure sustainability for aviation.
An aviation LCA harmonized approach will solve some of those challenges and provide huge benefits in embedding sustainability in aeronautical (and space) engineering. To address those questions and to start developing this harmonized LCA, DLR and NLR have started a collaboration in 2023.
This session about LCA in aviation wants to address all those questions (and many more) in an interactive way. Presentations will aim to stimulate a dialogue between the participants, on the topics of the session. 
After a short introduction of the collaboration between DLR and NLR, experts from the two research establishments will present their work. Then the floor will be open to the participants to share experiences and contribute to the creation of a LCA approach for the entire aviation community.