Master Thesis - Comparative LCA of product systems

Essity – a leading global hygiene and health company and the home of brands like Libero, TENA, Libresse, Tork, Sorbact and JOBST is offering an exciting and challenging master thesis opportunity for you who want to contribute with your expertise, energy and creativity.

About the job

Essity is dedicated to improving well-being through leading hygiene and health solutions. We work to create customer and consumer value while improving the environmental footprint of our products and services. Essity follows a life cycle approach from designing products, sourcing raw materials, producing products and all the way through how products are used and after use. 

The Product Sustainability team has more than 30 years of experience in conducting Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Essity's branded products and invested considerable time to collect high-quality LCA data from its suppliers and manufacturing locations. However, with a growing product assortment and a high pace of product innovation, new types of products are continuously designed. The level of LCA data quality collected for these products is not as high as more common products of the assortment due to the smaller scale of product sales volumes and the necessary prioritization of data collection from the 30 000 suppliers. When comparing different types of products during product development, it is crucial to know whether differences in LCA results are due to actual design changes or a variability in data quality.

Your role

You will be part of a team of LCA specialists in the Product Sustainability organization that can offer you expertise, knowledge and guidance in tools, methodology and life cycle thinking.

Your contribution will help to better understand the implication of input data quality on the LCA results, an increasingly important parameter to understand as we move into more and more materials being assessed at a higher speed and with a bigger range in input data quality.

Background

The sustainability challenge for Essity points us in the direction of increasing the speed and quality of product sustainability assessments. This will need to happen in combination with inclusion of new materials, processes and technology to be able to deliver on our corporate ambition to be the undisputed leader in health and hygiene as well as delivering on our sustainability agenda. This will need a maintained or improved quality of the product sustainability assessments.

Project

The goal of the project is to identify potential solutions to provide more robust conclusions from a comparative LCA of product systems modelled with different data quality. The work will focus on the concrete example of the comparison between washable products for period or incontinence protection and single-use products providing the same function.

We expect the main tasks to be identification of existing solutions in scientific literature to overcome varying LCA data quality, quantification of safety factors to be applied in a sensitivity analysis in this concrete example, testing the potential solutions on a concrete LCA example and documenting the results in a report.

Your profile

We are looking for two students with a good understanding of life cycle thinking and a strong interest in LCA and LCA methodology. You are currently studying on Master level at a Swedish university and will conduct your Master Thesis project during spring 2027.

You will have the opportunity to interact with experienced colleagues on the Product Sustainability team and directly contribute to the continuous improvement of a methodology to provide relevant support to our organization and customers.

This master thesis project will require close collaboration with our team and regular presence at our office in Gothenburg. Therefore, we are looking for students in Sweden who are either based in the Gothenburg area or can arrange accommodation locally for the duration of the project.

Application

Interested? If you are up for the challenge and think this sounds like you, apply online today! Kindly note that due to GDPR we will not accept applications via mail.

N.B.If you apply as a pair of students, send in one application each but make sure to clearly state in the application which person you intend to do the master thesis with.

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