Open sustainability technology

Cauldron Solutions is a firm building tools for sustainability assessment, with a focus on open science for life cycle assessment. Led by the developer of the Brightway LCA ecosystem, we have more than ten years of experience in finding innovative and practical software and data solutions. Cauldron was founded to focus resources on effective and stable Brightway development, and to provide support for researchers and industry in applying Brightway and its associated ecosystem to difficult challenges. For more information, please contact info@cauldron.ch.

Services

Support

Training

New! Book up to 10 hours of support online: Businesses Nonprofit/academic

Annual support contracts allow us to engage with Brightway users to solve interesting problems together. In addition to answering quick questions, we can also work together to tune algorithms, design data structures, or implement new inventory or impact assessment data. Pricing varies between 200-300 €/hour, depending on the length of the contract; academic and nonprofit customers are offered a discount.

Cauldron offers in-person or remote trainings on Brightway and its associated tools. Pricing depends on location and number of participants. Training topics include:

  • Intro to Brightway (1 - 3 days)
  • Advanced Brightway usage (2 - 3 days)
  • Regionalization using Brightway (3 days)
  • Temporal LCA using Brightway and Temporalis (3 days)
  • Prospective LCA using Brightway and Premise (3 days)

Vision

Cauldron was founded to take Brightway to the next level of software maturity, and to have a flexible approach to take on ambitious open data projects. Our objective is to make Brightway boring and stable, and this requires financial and human resources. In other words, Cauldron was founded to get money to pay professional programmers, making the ecosystem better for everyone, and hopefully creating a virtuous circle of high quality open software and data.

Team

Cauldron is led by Chris Mutel, the main developer of Brightway. After a PhD on the computational methodology of life cycle assessment from ETH Zürich, he worked as a senior scientist at the Paul Scherrer Institute for nine years, and is now a product manager at ecoinvent. He is the author of some scientific articles, chair of Départ de Sentier, and a passionate advocate for open science. His personal website is chris.mutel.org. He lives in a Swiss farmhouse built in 1605 that he is slowly turning into a lab for open source personal energy transitions.

Brightway

Brightway an ecosystem for Life Cycle Assessment. Programmed in Python (BSD 3-clause licence), it is modular, flexible, and allows for innovative applications. It has been used in over 150 scientific publications, such as:

Cauldron is responsible for realizing the Brightway strategic development plan.

Cauldron Solutions GmbH, Dorfsteig 8, 5223 Riniken, Switzerland, info@cauldron.ch, VAT CHE-369.227.213, Creative Commons License.