Organising committee

Tim Grant

Tim is the Director of Life Cycle Strategies and Adjunct Research Fellow with CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research.

A key facilitator in Australia’s shift towards life cycle thinking and environmental assessment, Tim is a founding member and president of ALCAS and the conference chair for the 2015 Conference Series. He is also the chairman of the Technical Committee of the Australia Life Cycle Database Initiative (AUSLCI).

His background in mineral process engineering and waste management consulting led Tim to seek a more rationale science based approach to environmental decision making.

Tim develops and applies LCA with a wide range of companies and organisations, through LCI Database development, software support and tool development. He has also been involved in key LCA studies including CSIRO’s comparison of transport fuels and the LCA of Building and Construction materials for the Building Commission of Australia.

 

Aaron Simmons

Aaron has covered a number of areas of agricultural systems during his research career including the effects of; elevated atmospheric CO2 on wheat physiology; land management on soil organic carbon sequestration; pasture management on production and weed dynamics; and genetic controls on plant-insect interactions. His most recent appointment as a Technical Specialist Life Cycle Assessment for NSW DPI provides an opportunity for Aaron to use his knowledge in ecology and farming systems to produce models that most accurately reflect the system being investigated.

 

Dr Brad Ridoutt

Dr Ridoutt is a Principal Research Scientist with Australia’s national science agency – The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). His expertise is in life cycle sustainability assessment which is applied to agricultural production, food systems and sustainable diets. Dr Ridoutt is actively involved in the development of improved calculation methods for sustainability assessment which can be used as a reliable basis for sustainability improvement. He has been a pioneer in the field of water footprinting and is currently leading a task group of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative on footprint indicators. He is also engaged in the international harmonisation of sustainability assessment and reporting aimed at reducing costs and risks for business and improving the quality of environmental declarations and labels directed toward the public. In this regard, he is the Australian delegate to several ISO working groups. He also chairs Standards Australia committee on life cycle assessment (EV-005). Dr Ridoutt has published around 60 papers in scientific journals. He has a PhD in plant physiology from the University of Melbourne.

 

Dr Marguerite Renouf

Dr Renouf is a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, and an Associate of Life Cycle Strategies. She has worked in environmental research at UQ for 15 years, with a particular interest in the environmental evaluation of production and consumption systems using Life Cycle Assessment and eco-efficiency. Her particular interest is in agriculture, food and bioenergy systems, and has contributed data to the Australian Life Cycle Inventory (AusLCI) database. Marguerite is a Board Member of the Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society and currently chairs the ALCAS Impact Assessment Committee, coordinating the development of a Best Practice Guide for Impact Assessment.

 

Dr Sandra Eady

Dr Eady is a Principal Research Scientist based at CSIRO Agriculture, Armidale, NSW. Dr Eady is a geneticist with expertise in developing national breeding programs and implementing them on-farm. Her current activities, in CSIRO Agriculture, expand her expertise in farming systems to the area of life cycle assessment, determining the carbon and water for agricultural products, on-farm greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions profiles and opportunities for biosequestration of carbon. Dr Eady is lead author of a CSIRO report that explores the GHG mitigation and carbon storage opportunities from rural land use for Queensland and, more broadly, Australia, a publication that shaped the design of nation policy on climate change. She is a member of CSIRO Agriculture team working on policy frameworks for agriculture and greenhouse gas offset design within the Carbon Farming Initiative, and the impact of an emerging carbon market on rural land use and market access. Sandra has also completed a number of lifecycle assessments for agricultural products and developed a publically available database of life cycle inventory published through AusLCI.

 

Steve Wiedemann

Steve is an Agricultural Scientist working in the areas of environmental monitoring, nutrient management, life cycle assessment and research. Steve’s work is a balance of on-farm soil and nutrient management advice to local feedlots and abattoirs, and industry level research and extension in the areas of nutrient management, sustainable manure reuse and the expanding areas of energy and water use efficiency. Steve has carried out several consultancy projects for local CMA’s, and continues to work in the feedlot, piggery, egg and chicken meat industries on projects related to manure reuse and life cycle assessment. Steve also carrys out desktop research and literature review work in his role at FSA Consulting. Steve joined FSA Consulting in 2006, having moved to Toowoomba from his families’ beef, sheep and cropping property in Inverell, NSW.

 

Speakers

 

Andrew D Moore

Andrew is passionate about doing things better and believes that doing things better also means doing them in a more sustainable way. The best way he has found to do this is through exploring the life of products, from cradle to grave. To uncover the story behind a product and discovering how it can be done better. The thrill of the science drives him as much as sharing the journey. Using this approach Andrew has helped many people in  a wide range of industries including agriculture, building and construction, mining and energy. He loves to inspire others to explore products life cycles through giving university lectures, presentations, and workshops. He supports the LCA community by actively contributing as member of the ALCAS board, ALCAS committees,  Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) technical advisory group. He is also an approved EPD verifier and a reviewer for the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment.

 

Dr Pip Brock

Pip has more than 20 years professional experience in natural resource management, including 5 years of specialist skill development in climate mitigation, including the application of Life Cycle Assessment. She currently leads NSW DPI’s Climate Mitigation group. Dr Brock has a broad background in environmental management in a primary industries context, namely soil and vegetation management and water policy. She has experience in administering funds and assessing projects; streamlining access to government services, through a NRM red-tape review and Government Access Centre project; and in socio-economic assessment. Pip Brock managed NSW DPI's contribution to the NSW Resource Condition MER Strategy and authored the Macquarie Marshes Land and Water Management Plan. She holds a BScAgr (Hons I), PhD and Grad. Cert. in Public Sector Management.

 

Paul (Mehdi) Hedayati

Paul started his career in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) where he managed +50 environmental improvement projects in Iran; all of the projects were funded by the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol. After migration to Australia, Paul initially jointed Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) in 2007 as a Resource Efficiency and Climate Change Consultant and then jointed RMIT University in 2010 in a project funded by the Adidas Group and called Sustainable Manufacturing Initiative. A year after, Paul accepted the role of Research Officer-Life Cycle Assessment at RMIT University where he conducted several Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) projects. Paul jointed NSW DPI in 2014 as a Research Officer-Life Cycle Assessment and is currently investigating opportunities for the cotton industry to achieve greenhouse gas emissions reduction. He is also building a detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for a cotton production system in north-west NSW.

 

Murilo Pagotto

Murilo is undertaking his PhD studies at The University of Queensland. His research intends to evaluate the sustainability of the food industry in Australia using Life Cycle Sustainability and Modelling approaches.  Murilo holds a bachelor degree from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil in 1997 for which he received the Esalq – USP, Department of Entomology, Phytopathology and Zoology research funding scholarship. His research was based on the evaluation of insecticides and fungicides commonly used in the agricultural sector in Brazil. In Australia, he undertook his Masters degree in Environmental Management at UQ under the supervision of Dr Anthony Halog. His Masters research was focused on analysing the eco-efficiency of the Australian food industry using different oriented approaches including Life Cycle Analysis methods. After graduation, he worked as a research assistant at UQ where he studied in the field of environmental management with an emphasis in analysing the eco-efficiency of the Australian food industry.

 

Dr Guangnan Chen

Dr Guangnan Chen is an Associate Professor in Agricultural Engineering at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia. He has extensive experience in conducting both fundamental and applied research. He is currently the Secretary, Board of Technical Section IV (Energy in Agriculture), CIGR (Commission Internationale du Génie Rural, or International Commission of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering). He is also a Member of National Executive Committee, Australian Society for Engineering in Agriculture (ASEAg), Institution of Engineers, Australia. He was selected as one of the first cohort of 16 mid-career researchers for the elite USQ Research Leadership Development Program (RLDP) for future research leaders of the university. Dr Chen has so far published 90 papers in international journals and conferences.

 

Professor David Herridge

Professor Herridge has more than 40 years of research on N2-fixing legumes in farming systems, involving basic soil microbiology through to plant physiology, agronomy and soil chemistry. At the University of New England's Primary Industries Innovation Centre, he is currently focussed on developing tools for more efficient N management in cropping systems, quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from and carbon footprints (using life cycle assessment (LCA)) of fertiliser- and legume-N dependent systems and international aid projects in South and south-east Asia to develop capacity for research on rhizobial inoculants, legume N2 fixation and farming systems research. Professor Herridge has authored/coauthored almost 200 citable publications.   

 

Dr Urs Schenker

Urs graduated in Environmental Engineering and Sciences, and holds a PhD in Environmental Chemistry from ETH Zurich. He has an MBA degree in Management of Technology and Innovation, and has been working in the Environmental Management team of Coca-Cola Hellenic. Since 2009, he works at the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne, coordinating the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology for the group, and developing tools and processes for Simplified Ecodesign based on the LCA methodology. He works with international initiatives to advance and harmonize LCA and ecodesign, and to simplify their application in industry, among others with the UNEP SETAC Life Cycle Initiative and the EU Food Sustainable Consumption and Production Roundtable.

 

Martin Roffeis

Martin is a researcher and doctoral student at KU-Leuven (KUL) and Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 2013, he started his doctoral research as a member of Professor Bart Muys’s Forest Ecology and Management Research Group at the at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the KU-Leuven (KUL). His research being jointly supervised, he is also affiliated to the Institut de Gestion de l'Environnement et d'Aménagement du Territoire (Institute for environmental management and land-use planning), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). 

 

Annette Cowie

Annette has a background in soil science and plant nutrition, with particular interest in sustainable resource management. She is Principal Research Scientist - Climate, in NSW Department of Primary Industries (NSW DPI) and Adjunct Professor, School of Environmental and Rural Science, at the University of New England (UNE). Annette is also Task Leader of the International Energy Agency Bioenergy research group Climate Change Effects of Biomass and Bioenergy Systems, and Land Degradation advisor on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility. Her current research focuses on sustainability assessment and greenhouse gas accounting in agriculture and forestry; investigating key aspects of soil carbon dynamics and biochar processes; and life cycle assessment of forestry, bioenergy and biochar systems.

 

Scientific Committee members

•Amy White

•Andrew D Moore

•Bharat Sharma

•Greg Toma

•Peter Fisher

•Stewart Ledgard

•Wahidul Biswas