Page 291 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

Social life cycle assessment of biofuel production 257

seems to be an inevitable approach in the coming decades. Therefore finding
the right raw materials and adequate processing options is critical to future
sustainable solutions (Khoshnevisan et al., 2018).
According to Valente et al. (2018), biofuels and biomaterials of the first
generation of agricultural crops are strictly dependent on the costs of raw
materials and the energy market and compete with other uses of biomass.
Thus by acquiring the cheapest raw material, it is not uncommon to import
from developing countries causing social, economic, and environmental
problems. In contrast, second generation biofuels from lignocellulosic mate-
rials have the advantage of using low value raw materials such as waste, small
diameter trees, or even dedicated crops. These materials consume less
resources than those used by first generation processes, thus enabling a more
sustainable supply chain.

2 Social life cycle assessment (SLCA)

The UNEP/SETAC (United Nations Environment Program)/Life Cycle
Initiative began with a focus on the environmental LCA (Life Cycle Assess-
ment) and continued its work on the perspective of sustainable develop-
ment. A major initial contribution was the publication of the SLCA
Guidelines (UNEP/SETAC, 2009). The need to integrate the LCA with
the social aspects that led to the SLCA dates back 17 years. Since then, there
is certainly much greater interest in the social impacts of products, in order to
promote sustainability. SLCA can be defined as an engineering tool dedi-
cated to the analysis and evaluation of the effects caused by changes in
the life cycle of a product or service. The tool assesses the social impacts that
are the subject of the study of sociology and, with the science of manage-
ment, belong to the domain of human and social sciences and presented
the state of the art of SLCA that intends to quantify the social impacts on
the complete life cycle (Dreyer et al., 2006; Iofrida et al., 2016; Lehmann
et al., 2011; Mattioda et al., 2015; Petti et al., 2018; Sonnemann et al.,
2015; Valdivia et al., 2013).
In the LCA community, based on the context of the triple bottom line,
Kl€oepffer (2008) basically stated that to achieve or assess sustainability, envi-
ronmental, economic, and social aspects have to be adjusted and controlled
against each other, and proposes the scheme LCSA (life cycle costing)
+SLCA, where society depends on the economy, and the economy depends
on the global ecosystem. The LCSA is an effective tool to support the prod-
uct development process in order to consider all aspects of eco-design in