21 Jul CIRCULAR ECONOMY, BEYOND THE BUZZWORDS: LIFE CYCLE THINKING FOR DECISION-MAKERS
Sustainability is everywhere on the agenda, yet many of us never receive the analytical tools to interrogate it. Most decisions are still made based on intuition, headlines, or single-metric claims. This seminar offers a different perspective: one that gives professionals a method to think with, rather than a discourse to repeat.
Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) is not an ideology; it is a methodology. It’s a cognitive habit that trains decision-makers to trace consequences across full value chains, to spot trade-offs that single metrics hide, and to challenge sustainability claims with evidence. Through this lens, the seminar covers the strategic role of critical raw materials and circularity as a lever for industrial and geopolitical resilience; the multiple dimensions of environmental sustainability (climate, water, toxicity, resources, ecosystems) and the principles of eco-design and circular design; systemic effects such as burden shifting and rebound; and how all of this translates into concrete domains like packaging eco-design and Extended Producer Responsibility. It is the same kind of foundational reasoning that quantitative methods bring to finance or that legal reasoning brings to law: not a specialist tool, but a discipline of thought that sharpens professional judgement and makes you harder to mislead and better equipped to lead.
The seminar is deliberately transdisciplinary, because the underlying question is the same across professions: where do the impacts really sit, and what are we shifting around when we claim to solve them?
The course is taught through a flipped-classroom format: students prepare short real-world case studies before each session and use class time for structured discussion, combined with an immersive two-session Circular Economy Collage workshop. It closes with a final group pitch on a real packaging eco-design and EPR challenge, with industry feedback from Ecoembes.
GEOFFREY LONCA
Geoffrey Lonca leads the Sustainable Transition Hub at IE University, where he designs and leads research and educational initiatives that translate sustainability ambitions into evidence-based decisions. He holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from CIRAIG (Polytechnique Montréal), one of the world’s leading research centres in life cycle thinking and previously held leadership roles at Capgemini Engineering in France and Spain, advising industrial clients across mobility, energy, and consumer goods. His peer-reviewed research questions whether circular strategies actually deliver environmental gains.
Skills
The Microsoft/BCG Sustainability Skills Gap report identifies the bottleneck not as awareness but as the analytical capability to translate awareness into decisions. This seminar targets that gap. By the end of the course, students will be able to:
– Use Life Cycle Thinking as a decision-making framework to evaluate sustainability claims, supplier risks, and product or policy strategies across the full value chain
– Diagnose exposure to critical raw materials and assess how circular strategies can secure supply, manage cost volatility, and strengthen industrial and geopolitical resilience.
– Read and interpret multi-impact environmental data – including the EU Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and life cycle assessment (LCA) results – to challenge sustainability claims, recognize greenwashing or greenhushing, and apply eco-design and circular-design principles that reduce impacts without shifting them elsewhere.
– Anticipate burden shifts, rebound effects, and consequential dynamics when evaluating circular and low-carbon interventions, which is a competency repeatedly identified as missing in graduates by leading employers and policymakers.
– Build and defend an evidence-based proposition (product, service, regulation, or investment thesis), communicating trade-offs clearly to non-expert decision-makers (clients, regulators, senior management, or boards).
Schedule
Which dates?
01-mar
08-mar
15-mar
05-apr
12-apr
19-apr
What day?
MONDAYS
What time?
11.00-12.30
