Brightway Software Framework

Warning

This version of the documentation is for older releases of Brightway (legacy or brightway2). It includes only those pages which are relevant to the legacy releases. To access the complete documentation, please switch to the latest version. The legacy releases supports the popular Activity Browser user interface, but do not have the latest features of Brightway. You can learn more about the different versions of Brightway here.

What is Brightway?

Brightway is an open-source software package for life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmental impact assessment written in the Python programming language. LCA is a method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a product, process, or service. It involves analyzing all of the inputs and outputs of a system, including raw materials, energy use, and waste products, and quantifying the environmental impacts of these inputs and outputs over the entire lifecycle of the system.

What can Brightway do?

Brightway is designed to make it easy to work with large datasets and perform LCA calculations quickly and accurately. It thus provides a powerful tool for anyone interested in performing LCA or evaluating the environmental impacts of products and processes. Brightway is not intended to replace software like SimaPro or OpenLCA, but instead offers possibilities to break the limits of conventional LCA. Brightway is especially attractive for researchers, especially when used with Jupyter notebooks.