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Social life cycle assessment of biofuel production 267

3 Conclusions

The LCA and LCCA tools do not include the social dimension in the sus-
tainability assessment. Because of this limitation, the SLCA method has
recently emerged as a methodological approach aimed at assessing social
aspects throughout a product’s life cycle. This type of analysis is still new
and there are few studies that apply SLCA in the biodiesel life cycle. Accord-
ˇ
c
ing to Zivkovi et al. (2017), it is not yet possible to conduct a comprehen-
sive SLCA. They suggest its improvement through the development of a
universal set of indicators, databases for social aspects, and well-functioning
models. Ekener et al. (2018a) state that the most appropriate approach iden-
tified is multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), which responds to several of
the demands that SLCA places on the aggregation method and for Ren et al.
(2015) MCDM for LCSA allows decision makers/stakeholders to identify
the most sustainable scenarios to achieve their goals across multiple
alternatives.
According to Ekener et al. (2018a,b), further development of the SLCA
is required, and one of the challenges is to establish the corresponding scales
for which indicators of positive impacts at different sites can be assessed. The
use phase should be included in the SLCA assessments to better capture all
relevant positive impacts. It is important to assess the impacts on the SLCA
structure by defining them as positive at the beginning of the analysis. The
aggregation methods for positive and negative social impacts found in the
literature are mainly surveys, questionnaires, and monetization. Because
these tools are inconsistent with the preconditions for the SLCA, their use-
fulness is limited. It is necessary to develop methodologies on how positive
impacts can be taken into account, together with the negative impacts on
SLCA. According to the authors it is important to evaluate the positive
impacts separately in future efforts of the SLCA in order to clearly distinguish
their contribution to the total social impact. This can inform future actions
to improve these positive social impacts and not just to mitigate the negative
impacts.
According to Rafiaani et al. (2018) there is still no methodology that
covers all social aspects, as it depends on the scope of the study, the availabil-
ity of data, and the priorities of the stakeholders. While growing, there is still
a lack of research on the social impacts of innovative technologies within the
biologically based economy. This requires more attention to the need for
future direction of research and investments in the social concepts of biofuel
supply chains.