Page 56 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

3.3 Social life cycle assessment methodology 51
adaptations, and was developed in accordance with the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards
(Ekener Petersen, 2015). It has been applied in different sectors, such as food, biofuels, mate-
rials, technology, and services (Vasta et al., 2015).
According to the definition given by UNEP/SETAC (2009), S-LCA is an assessment tech-
nique to evaluate the social and socio-economic aspects of products and their potential im-
pacts along their life cycle from extraction and processing of raw materials to final
disposal, passing through manufacturing, distribution, use, reuse, maintenance, and
recycling. This technique tries to assess the social impacts of a product or service where social
impacts are mainly understood as the impacts on human capital, human well-being, cultural
heritage, and social behavior (Sala et al., 2015). These impacts can be associated with the be-
haviors of enterprises or with their processes and can be positive or negative. They are con-
sequences of social interactions raised during an activity, such as production, consumption,
or disposal (UNEP/SETAC, 2009). The basic idea is that social impacts could be embodied in
products and related to supply chains (Sala et al., 2015). S-LCA can be a profitable tool to give
answers to the following questions: what is the social value of products? How to define it, and
to quantify it? (Russo Garrido et al., 2018).
S-LCA can be applied on its own or in combination with LCA, using generic and
site-specific data (UNEP/SETAC, 2009). However, the level of methodological development,
application, and harmonization of S-LCA is still at a preliminary stage (Sala et al., 2015).
Contrary to other social assessment techniques, it takes into consideration the entire life cycle
of a product or a service and helps in evaluating the social impacts that directly affect stake-
holders. The stakeholders considered are clustered in five categories based on shared inter-
ests, namely workers/employees, local community, society, consumers, and value chain
actors. Each category of stakeholders is associated with specific subcategories, for instance
workers/employees are linked to the subcategories “freedom of association,” “child
labor,” “fair salary,” “working hours,” “forced labor,” “discrimination,” “health and
safety,” and “social benefits.” Consumers are linked to the subcategories “health and
safety,” “feedback mechanism,” “consumer privacy,” “transparency,” and “end of life
responsibility” (UNEP/SETAC, 2009).
In general, there are two methodological approaches to conduct S-LCA, called
“performance reference point” methods and “impact pathways” methods. Performance ref-
erence point methods take into consideration living and working conditions of workers at
different life cycle phases; whereas impact pathways methods evaluate the social impacts
using characterization models with indicators similar to LCA (Sala et al., 2015). Different
S-LCA methodologies have been proposed in several case studies and discussions are still
open in the research community regarding the role of local stakeholders and the need of a
common social theory as base to develop S-LCA (Ekener Petersen, 2015). It is still under de-
bate whether qualitative or quantitative assessment methods are more suitable for S-LCA;
indeed, a certain level of subjectivity cannot be avoided (Sala et al., 2015) and social issues
are influenced by the subjectivity of researchers and the social context (Soltanpour et al.,
2018). Despite this, S-LCA should be used to support decision making by different actors,
identifying how to reduce the social hotspots along the supply chain (Sala et al., 2015),
and can support the organizations within decision-making processes by optimizing the ef-
forts and resources in order to achieve social sustainability (D’Eusanio et al., 2018). Currently,