The winners of this year’s Graedel Prizes were announced at the 2026 Gordon Research Conference in Newry, Maine, USA and presented at the 2026 ISIE Socio-Economic Metabolism Conference in Cambridge, UK. Graedel Prizes are the best paper prizes of the Journal of Industrial Ecology (JIE), the official journal of the ISIE. Graedel Prizes are named for Professor Thomas E. Graedel in recognition of the vital and long‐lasting contributions he has provided to the scientific development of industrial ecology (IE). Two Graedel prizes are awarded annually for best papers published in the JIE in the preceding year. One prize is for a junior author and one for a senior author. Prizes are awarded to the sole author of a Graedel Prize winning paper, or the first author of a multi-authored paper. The JIE’s Best Paper Prize Committee, chaired by Christopher Kennedy, evaluated nominated papers and selected the winners.
The Graedel Prize for the best paper published by a Junior Author in 2025 was awarded to Aleksandra Kim for the article “Global sensitivity analysis of correlated uncertainties in life cycle assessment” authored by Aleksandra Kim, Christopher Mutel, and Stefanie Hellweg. The reference for the article is Journal of Industrial Ecology 29(4): 1090-1104.
The Graedel Prize for the best paper published by a Senior Author in 2025 was awarded to Hanspeter Wieland for the article “Assessing mining-related land footprints of global steel use with a global physical input–output model” authored by Hanspeter Wieland, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Nina Eisenmenger, Takuma Watari, and Stefan Giljum. The reference for the article is Journal of Industrial Ecology 29(6): 1987-2004.
Although they did not quite win a Graedel Prize, the Best Paper Prize Committee identified two additional articles as receiving special consideration. These articles are “The “nature” and “nurture” of product lifetimes in dynamic stock modeling” by Kamila Krych, Daniel Müller, and Johan Pettersen and “Bayesian model selection for network discrimination and risk-informed decision-making in material flow analysis” by Jiankan Liao, Sidi Deng, Xun Huan, and Daniel Cooper.
Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Graedel Prizes and many thanks to all who nominated articles for the prizes and especially to the members of the Best Paper Prize Committee for evaluating the papers and selecting the winners!
