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timex_lca

A Python package for time-explicit Life Cycle Assessment that helps you assess the environmental impacts of products and processes over time.
https://github.com/brightway-lca/bw_timex

Category: Industrial Ecology
Sub Category: Life Cycle Assessment

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life-cycle-assessment

Last synced: about 20 hours ago
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Time-explicit Life Cycle Assessment

README.md

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bw_timex makes your LCA use the right data for the right point in time. It's a python package for time-explicit Life Cycle Assessment, built on top of the Brightway LCA framework.

⏳ The problem

An LCA normally evaluates your entire supply chain with data for a single point in time. But an electric car built in 2025 has a battery made in 2024, is driven on an evolving electricity mix until 2040, and is recycled with 2040 technologies. Anything long-lived, or in a system that changes over time, ends up being assessed with data that doesn't match when processes actually happen.

You can work around this by hand: split each exchange into one copy per point in time, work out which year every process upstream lands in — a delay at one level shifts every other process connected to it — and wire each copy to a different time-specific background database. It's tedious, easy to get wrong, and you redo it every time the model changes.

✨ What bw_timex does

You bring your normal Brightway model, plus:

  • temporal distributions, specifying when each exchange happens relative to the process consuming it — either a single shift ("2 years earlier") or spread over time ("30% two years earlier, 50% now, 20% four years later")
  • time-specific process data, like background databases representing different points in time (e.g. from premise) and, for your own foreground processes, how they change over time (e.g. efficiency gains)

bw_timex figures out when every process in the supply chain actually happens, relinks each one to the background database matching that date (interpolating between databases in between), and applies your time-specific amounts.

You get a time-explicit inventory: each process assessed with data from the time it actually occurs, and each emission tagged with when it happens — so you can characterize it with dynamic characterization functions instead of static factors.

Most useful for long-lived products, strongly evolving production systems, and biogenic carbon. Still unsure whether you need time-explicit LCA? Check out our decision tree for some guidance.

👩‍💻 Getting Started

📚 Citation

If bw_timex supports your scientific work, please consider citing our companion publications:

  • The conceptual framework and formalization of time-explicit LCA are described in our methodology paper
  • The implementation of this methodology in bw_timex is covered by our JOSS paper

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! If you have suggestions or want to fix a bug, please:

💬 Support

If you have any questions or need help, do not hesitate to contact us:

Citation (CITATION.cff)

cff-version: "1.2.0"
authors:
- family-names: Diepers
  given-names: Timo
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-8566-8618"
- family-names: Müller
  given-names: Amelie
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5609-5609"
- family-names: Jakobs
  given-names: Arthur
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0825-2184"
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.19230937
message: If you use this software, please cite our article in the
  Journal of Open Source Software.
preferred-citation:
  authors:
  - family-names: Diepers
    given-names: Timo
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-8566-8618"
  - family-names: Müller
    given-names: Amelie
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5609-5609"
  - family-names: Jakobs
    given-names: Arthur
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0825-2184"
  date-published: 2026-04-16
  doi: 10.21105/joss.09621
  issn: 2475-9066
  issue: 120
  journal: Journal of Open Source Software
  publisher:
    name: Open Journals
  start: 9621
  title: "bw_timex: A Python Package for Time-Explicit Life Cycle
    Assessment"
  type: article
  url: "https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.09621"
  volume: 11
title: "bw_timex: A Python Package for Time-Explicit Life Cycle
  Assessment"

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Committers metadata

Last synced: 3 days ago

Total Commits: 1,033
Total Committers: 12
Avg Commits per committer: 86.083
Development Distribution Score (DDS): 0.297

Commits in past year: 288
Committers in past year: 5
Avg Commits per committer in past year: 57.6
Development Distribution Score (DDS) in past year: 0.191

Name Email Commits
TimoDiepers t****s@g****m 726
muelleram a****r@c****l 165
Arthur Jakobs a****s@i****e 78
copilot-swe-agent[bot] 1****t 19
Adeline Jerome a****e@c****e 16
renovate[bot] 2****] 15
cyclochlo c****r@g****m 6
Michael Weinold 2****d 2
Arthur Jakobs j****r 2
Timo Diepers t****s@M****x 2
Pingping1997 w****0@1****m 1
Sabina BEDNAROVA s****a@l****u 1

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Issue and Pull Request metadata

Last synced: 4 days ago

Total issues: 33
Total pull requests: 151
Average time to close issues: 3 months
Average time to close pull requests: 10 days
Total issue authors: 9
Total pull request authors: 6
Average comments per issue: 1.58
Average comments per pull request: 0.62
Merged pull request: 90
Bot issues: 1
Bot pull requests: 48

Past year issues: 8
Past year pull requests: 56
Past year average time to close issues: 3 days
Past year average time to close pull requests: 9 days
Past year issue authors: 6
Past year pull request authors: 5
Past year average comments per issue: 2.88
Past year average comments per pull request: 0.98
Past year merged pull request: 38
Past year bot issues: 0
Past year bot pull requests: 13

More stats: https://issues.ecosyste.ms/repositories/lookup?url=https://github.com/brightway-lca/bw_timex

Top Issue Authors

  • TimoDiepers (12)
  • muelleram (7)
  • jakobsarthur (7)
  • mfastudillo (2)
  • mahajanhrishikesh (1)
  • TEhhhA (1)
  • renovate[bot] (1)
  • philmas (1)
  • rahuldevikar (1)

Top Pull Request Authors

  • TimoDiepers (84)
  • renovate[bot] (48)
  • muelleram (6)
  • jakobsarthur (6)
  • Copilot (5)
  • michaelweinold (2)

Top Issue Labels

  • bug (9)
  • enhancement (7)
  • required for paper (1)

Top Pull Request Labels

  • enhancement (1)

Package metadata

pypi.org: bw-timex

Time-explicit Life Cycle Assessment

  • Homepage:
  • Documentation: https://bw-timex.readthedocs.io/
  • Licenses: BSD License
  • Latest release: 1.2.1 (published 4 days ago)
  • Last Synced: 2026-08-16T15:03:32.947Z (2 days ago)
  • Versions: 30
  • Dependent Packages: 0
  • Dependent Repositories: 0
  • Downloads: 320 Last month
  • Rankings:
    • Dependent packages count: 10.803%
    • Downloads: 22.606%
    • Average: 31.416%
    • Dependent repos count: 60.838%
  • Maintainers (1)

Dependencies

.github/workflows/python-package-deploy.yml actions
  • actions/checkout main composite
  • astral-sh/setup-uv v7 composite
  • pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish release/v1 composite
.github/workflows/python-test.yml actions
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  • astral-sh/setup-uv v7 composite
  • codecov/codecov-action v5 composite
docs/environment.yaml conda
  • astroid 3.3.11
  • graphviz 11.0.0
  • ipython
  • myst-nb 1.1.0
  • myst-parser 3.0.1
  • pip
  • pydata-sphinx-theme 0.15.3
  • python 3.11
  • sphinx 7.3.7
  • sphinx-autoapi 3.0.0
  • sphinx-autobuild 2024.4.16
  • sphinx-copybutton 0.5.2
  • sphinx-design 0.5.0
  • sphinx-favicon 1.0.1
  • sphinx-notfound-page 1.0.0
  • sphinxcontrib-mermaid 0.9.2
environment.yml conda
  • bw_timex >=0.3.4
  • python 3.11
pyproject.toml pypi
  • bw-graph-tools >0.4
  • bw-temporalis >=1.1
  • bw2calc ==2.3.2
  • bw2data ==4.5.4
  • dynamic-characterization >=1.2.0
  • ipython *
  • ipywidgets *
  • loguru *
  • matplotlib *
  • numpy *
  • pandas *
  • seaborn *
  • tqdm *
uv.lock pypi
  • 142 dependencies

Score: 12.475855478094124