Master Thesis - Water footprint in LCA

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

Driven to improving well-being through innovative hygiene and health solutions, Essity creates value for customers and consumers while continuously reducing the environmental footprint of its products and services. The company applies a life cycle perspective across its operations, from product design and sourcing of raw material to product use and end-of-life management, enabling more sustainable solutions throughout the value chain.

The Product Sustainability team has more than 30 years of experience in conducting Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) of Essity's products and has invested considerable resources in collecting LCA data from suppliers and manufacturing sites across the value chain.

Our LCAs focus on a selection of key environmental impact categories identified through analysis of the company’s significant environmental aspects, company strategy and targets. The choice of these impact categories is reviewed on a regular basis to ensure relevance. One area which has gained increasing attention is water footprint assessments. We have therefore been following the development of water footprint indicators for use in LCA over the years to better understand water scarcity in a life cycle perspective and to identify the best approach for including it in LCAs.

One of the followed methods is the AWARE method (Available Water Remaining), a midpoint indicator assessing the potential of water deprivation associated with water consumption. However, preliminary work has identified several challenges related to the implementation, especially related to inventory data availability and quality and allocation within modelling.

In 2024 Essity also introduced a water target to reduce freshwater withdrawal by 25% in water-stressed regions for tissue production which have been identified with the use of the WWF Water Risk Filter. As a result, there is also of interest to better understand how WWF Water Risk Filter can complement the work for water footprint in Essity LCAs.

With this context, there is a need for evaluating and initiating a way forward for integrating water footprint assessments for Essity LCAs.

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 from the in-depth study of the AWARE methodology and how to include it in Essity’s way of working with LCAs will be important and strengthen the sustainability journey beyond carbon footprint.

Background

Environmental impacts of products are important to understand, and environmental performance is gaining focus and importance from a business perspective. The water footprint will likely be the next impact category to be focused on and potentially become a differentiator in business dialogues with customers and consumers.

The water footprint is important for any water intense industry like e.g. the tissue industry in which Essity is part of.

Project

The goal of the project is to identify how water scarcity footprints using the AWARE method can be reliably implemented in LCAs for hygiene products through improved, manufacturing, supplier- and generic inventory data quality and availability, regionalization of inventory flows and allocation modelling. Additionally, we would also like to understand if using the AWARE method sufficiently covers all relevant aspects related to water and if the WWF Water Risk Filter can be used as a proxy or screening tool for product water scarcity footprints calculated with the AWARE method?

The work will focus on:

- Mapping of the largest sources for uncertainty in water footprint results

- Mapping of status of water footprint inventory data (Essity specific, supplier specific and generic data needed for hygiene LCAs)

- Proposal of ways forward to increase data quality of inventory data

- How to handle allocation issues when relevant, i.e. in production units and for recycled materials

- Evaluation of if the AWARE method sufficiently covers water from a product sustainability perspective

- Evaluation if the WWF Water Risk Filter can be used as a proxy or screening tool

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.

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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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Application End Date:

08 nov. 2026
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## Job Requisition ID:
Essity266189