Sander is a postdoctoral researcher in Industrial Ecology, with an expertise in life cycle assessment of manufactured products.

More information about Sander van Nielen

Professional experience

Sander van Nielen has been a postdoc at CML since 2025. His areas of expertise include life cycle assessment (LCA) and Digital Product Passports. Sander obtained a BSc degree in Chemistry and an MSc in Industrial Ecology. Both are joint degrees from Leiden University and TU Delft. Afterwards, he worked for two years as a sustainability policy maker at the Municipality of Rotterdam.
He completed his PhD research at the Industrial Ecology department of CML in 2024. The dissertation is titled “Environmental sustainability of NdFeB magnet recycling: foresight study on recycling systems and technologies”. As a postdoc, he contributed to the Getting the Data Right project, coordinated by Aalborg University. In this role, he created data pipelines for the collection and cleaning of monetary supply and use tables.

Research topic

: Sander is participating in the Lasers4MaaS project, in which he is developing methods for the automated calculation of sustainability metrics in manufacturing. These methods will be applied to create Digital Product Passports for laser-welded products.

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Activities