Page 113 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

5.4 The social assessment—S-LCA 109
5.4.1.1 Guidance document
In 2009, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and Society for Environmental
Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) published Guidelines for Society Life Assessment of Products
(hereinafter referred to as Guidelines). Guidelines (Benoıˆt et al., 2009) takes ISO14040: 2006
Environmental management-life cycle assessment-Principles and frameworks and ISO 14044: 2006
Environmental management-life cycle assessment-Requirements and guidelines as the skeleton.
The four phases of goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and in-
terpretation have been put forward. Each has been stipulated and described in detail. After
that, case studies have full references. In the inventory analysis phase, Guidelines provides two
social impact categories. One of them departs from stakeholders and the other goes form the
impact types, which provides the foundation for S-LCA to development database and design
software.
In 2010, the UNEP/SETAC came up with an S-LCA methodology manual, which
expounded in detail the impact categories based on stakeholders (Benoıˆt-Norris et al.,
2011). The stakeholders consist of workers, local community, society, consumer, and value
chain-participant. The impact categories include 31 subclassifications, including fair pay,
technological development, fair competition, and so on. The manual gave the exact definition
of the each subclassification, listed the international conventions and agreements related to
the subclassification, and put forward the common goals of all mankind and suggested
instructions.

5.4.1.2 Theoretical research
In the years before and after 2009, when Guidelines was published, scholars meticulously
discussed the theoretical framework of the S-LCA. The standardized indicators missed in the
methodology have been investigated. It also proposed the adjustment method for the classi-
fication method of stakeholders. All the above have obtained some achievements.
Benoıˆt-Norris et al. (2011) summarized the development of the S-LCA methodology put
forward by UNEP/SETAC and suggested that the methodology manual still needed to be
perfected with the development of the case study. Meanwhile, he pointed out that the meth-
odology manual only provides the inventory indicators of each social classification and the
approaches of data collection, but the method to uniformly quantize the data of the research
result had not been explained, which plays a role for standardizing models in LCA. Therefore,
the author suggested that the standardization models need further investigation.
Dreyer (2009) summarized the development of the S-LCA methodology and put forward a
set of frameworks of the S-LCA, combined with the previous work. He also summarized the
methods of quantitative evaluation and set up four models of impact catalogue. The methods
in the paper have been used in case studies. Mathe (2014) discussed the classification of stake-
holders. He thought that the classification of stakeholders should not be limited to the five
categories proposed in Guidelines, which should be supplemented and adjusted.

5.4.1.3 Case study
In the case study aspect, many scholars use different select and quantitative methods of
indicators. By evaluating the social life cycle assessment of different products, kinds of con-
clusions, good for decisions, have been gained. Some scholars have compared the social