Page 240 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

238 11. A composite life cycle sustainability index for sustainability prioritization of industrial systems

system, which focuses on the protection of human rights of employees by setting require-
ments for working conditions in internal and upstream supplier operations. ISO 26000
(IOS, 2017) covers seven main categories, including organizational governance, human rights,
labor practices, the environment, fair operating practices, consumer issues, and community
involvement and development, which can be utilized for better understanding social respon-
sibility of organizations. Compared to the former four frameworks regarding the social-based
assessment, the framework of UNEP and SETAC S-LCA guidelines is preferable to be
adopted in the field of social life cycle assessment, which includes 31 social indicators related
to five divergent stakeholder groups (i.e., workers, consumers, local community, society, and
value chain actors). The reason for the popularity of the UNEP S-LCA can be attributed to the
fact that S-LCA is similar to E-LCA, where the same procedures, i.e., definition of goal and
scope of the study, inventory analysis, and impact assessment, need to be implemented
(UNEP/SETAC, 2009; Wu et al., 2015; Papong et al., 2015).
By reviewing the literature, the most important social concerns/responsibilities could be
classified into six main categories:
(1) concerning the safety and health of the workers (like injuries of the employees);
(2) concerning the safety and health of the local communities (like potential of accident risks);
(3) contributing to development of the society (like job creation);
(4) promoting social responsibility among the value chain actors (like working conditions
within the whole value chain);
(5) concerning the safety and health of the consumers (like product safety); and
(6) other concerns (like stakeholder satisfaction) (K€ uhnen and Hahn, 2017).
Therefore, the indicators for evaluating the social performance of an industrial system
should be selected rationally according to which stakeholder will be involved in a certain
stage among the whole life span. For instance, workers and local communities would be more
engaged into the stage of raw material extraction and treatment, while consumers and value
chain actors would be highly involved in the stage of utilization of product.

11.4.2 Social Indicators from the UNEP S-LCA guidelines

Among the available social evaluation systems, the guidelines for S-LCA of product
published by the UNEP is the most commonly practiced one, which embraces five catego-
rized stakeholders including the worker, local community, society, consumer, and value
chain actors (UNEP/SETAC, 2009), as given in Table 11.7. The reason for the classification
is to support the identification of different stakeholders with divergent concerns, to classify
multiple indicators within groups that have the same impacts, and to implement the
corresponding assessment and interpretation. Here, Table 11.7 summarizes the stakeholder
categories and the corresponding social indicators, where 26 criteria (among a total number of
31 indicators) are suggested in this chapter for representing the social concerns of the indus-
trial systems.
For conducting the S-LCA, the procedures of the implementation of E-LCA can be
referred, where the items of goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory analysis, life cycle
impact assessment, and interpretation should also be conducted in an orderly manner.