Social Life Cycle Assessment

Special session coordinator: Catherine Benoit, UQAM

2009 is an important year for the development of Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA). The publication of the Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment by the UNEP SETAC Life Cycle Initiative sets the stage, outlining a framework and best-practices for assessing the social and socio-economic impacts of product life cycles, and also highlights where new research is needed.

This session provides a forum in which to share the results of research and applications in the development and demonstration of impact assessment methods, databases, and software tools that bring Social LCA to a wider state of practice. Case studies in Social LCA are welcome as part of this session scope, as are strategies for and examples of collecting social life cycle inventory data. Other topics of interest for the session include experiences with stakeholder engagement and peer review of S-LCA studies.

We look forward to dynamic contributions on this extremely exciting and fast-changing topic.

Presenters:

Development of a screening tool for Social LCA: The Social Hot spots Database Part 1
Catherine Benoit, UQAM
presentation

Product Life Cycles include many unit processes. In fact, every sector can be found, at some level, in every product supply chain. For this reason, in environmental LCA we use “generic” or industry average data for the “background” processes that make small individual (but possibly large total) contributions to total impacts over a life cycle. We then identify the processes which make a major contribution to total impacts, and these “hot spots” become priorities for data refinement and possibly for environmental progress as well.

A similar process of identifying hot spots using average data can be very helpful in the early stages of a social LCA. Social hot spots are unit processes located in a region where a situation occurs that may be considered as a problem, a risk or an opportunity, in function of a social theme of interest. The social theme of interest represents issues that are considered as threatening social well-being or that may contribute to its further development.

The presentation is the first of two which will, in sequence, describe the elements of a global social hot spot database and modeling system, and will present results for a case study addressing child labor risk.

The global hot spot database and analysis system is being developed in an open source, non-proprietary way. An open, transparent database uses and summarizes best-available information about reported risks and measures relating to each category of concern or impact in social LCA. The data table summarizes risks and opportunities by sector, by region.

When combined with the global IO model with data on worker participation, we are able to conduct a “life cycle attribute assessment”, and also to identify social hot spots in the global supply chains of products. As with environmental LCA, these social hot spots then become priorities for data refinement, and may provide the best opportunities for achieving improvements in social impacts within a given product life cycle.

Development of a screening tool for Social LCA: The Social Hot spots Database Part 2
Greg Norris, Sylvatica
presentation

Product Life Cycles include many unit processes. In fact, every sector can be found, at some level, in every product supply chain. For this reason, in environmental LCA we use “generic” or industry average data for the “background” processes that make small individual (but possibly large total) contributions to total impacts over a life cycle. We then identify the processes which make a major contribution to total impacts, and these “hot spots” become priorities for data refinement and possibly for environmental progress as well.

A similar process of identifying hot spots using average data can be very helpful in the early stages of a social LCA. Social hot spots are unit processes located in a region where a situation occurs that may be considered as a problem, a risk or an opportunity, in function of a social theme of interest. The social theme of interest represents issues that are considered as threatening social well-being or that may contribute to its further development.

The system is built upon the GTAP global input-output model. This system provides data for 113 regions, and each is differentiated into 57 sectors. The inputs to each sector, used to produce its product output, are specified quantitatively; so are the trade flows between each region. The model forms the backbone of a global input/output LCA model.

To support global social hot spot assessment in LCA, this system is augmented with data on worker participation levels by sector by region.

The presentation will describe how researchers and LCA practitioners in any region can make use of the model, to support:

a) Development of environmental and social LCI databases for their country, in a way that takes explicit account of global trade flows;
b) Identification of social hot spots in product life cycles.

Comparison of the effects caused by the production of a rose bouquet in Ecuador to those caused by the production in the Netherlands using the Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment
Andreas Ciroth, GreenDeltaTC GmbH
Juliane Franze, GreenDeltaTC
presentation

We will present a case study for a social life cycle assessment (sLCA) based on the recently published “Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products” as developed by a UNEP/SETAC Working Group. The general aim is to “try out” the proposed method, which so far has not been tested in detail on a specific case. The case study itself is about the impacts of rose production. It compares the effects caused by the production of a rose bouquet in Ecuador to those caused by the production in the Netherlands. In both cases, the roses are delivered to the European market, and put on sale at a venue in Aalsmeeer, the Netherlands. Further objective is to identify differences and similarities in environmental and social life cycle modelling, and find both social and environmental hot spots in each of the life cycles. While additional effort will be needed in terms of data collection,methodological experiences, and software support, the guidelines as such proved to be applicable. Coupling social and environmental LCA has synergies so that both together can be performed quicker than if each were conducted separately. In addition, the case study shows that results can be completely different for the environmental and for the social dimension, so that it will often be needed to perform both assessments if a complete picture is required.

Achieving Comprehensive Social Impact Assessment
Lise Laurin, EarthShift
Mellisa Hamilton, EarthShift
presentation

Just as environmental impact assessments miss important environmental affects and are often augmented by a risk assessment, the inclusion of social impacts in an assessment method will miss important social impacts. Because social impact assessment is a relatively new concept, there will be a learning curve over which the methods will get better and more comprehensive. In addition, social impacts are less tangible than environmental impacts, and may never be as well modeled using a life cycle assessment approach. These impacts can also be assessed using a risk assessment, this time an assessment of social risk.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is often criticized for missing major environmental impacts. As an example, brominated flame retardants, even those which are no longer manufactured due to the possibility of risk to human health, are ignored by all major impact assessment methods. The risks to fish migrations in hydroelectric power generation are also ignored. To ensure that these important environmental impacts are not ignored in major decision-making, most LCA practitioners recommend a complimentary risk assessment to capture these other impacts.

Social LCA has even more potential for missing impacts. Cultural biases mean that one society’s benefit is another’s bane. We have seen, however, that social risk assessment as applied using Total Cost Assessment (TCA) has done an excellent job at digging out the potential social impacts of a behavior or decision. Applying TCA to several projects, social concerns have come to the forefront: concerns over noise, immediate human health impacts, disease transmittal from one location to another, and local employment, for example. While TCA is only one example of a social risk assessment, we will show how this method has brought the issue of social sustainability side by side with economic and environmental sustainability. By including this type of assessment as a compliment to the LCA methodology at the outset, we simplify the initial task for Social Impact Assessment Method developers and give them a greater chance of success.

Proposition of a characterization model in Social LCA : Fair Salary Index
Julie Parent, UQAM
presentation

Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) has evolved a lot in the last year, with the publication of the Guidelines for SLCA for products and services (2009) by the Life Cycle Initiative’s task force on the integration of social aspects into Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This international Taskforce has agreed on a general framework for the tool which is presented in the Guidelines. However, methodological issues still need further research. This is the case for social mechanisms, which need to be translated into characterization models for calculating indicator results for the impact categories.

Regarding this need, we proposed an evaluation model for the characteristic “Salary”, an important subject when assessing the impact category “work conditions”.

As it is proposed in the Guidelines for SLCA, two levels of assessment can take place depending on the goal of the study: hotspot assessment, where the unit processes are at the national and sectoral level, and case specific assessment, where the unit processes become more precise regarding the organizations responsible of the activities along the life cycle. Our Fair Salary Index belongs to the Hotspot assessment and aims to measure the adequacy of the salary expected to be at the national level. It aggregates indicators helping to identify if a country is at risk regarding salaries. These indicators have been extracted from ILO’s work on Decent Work. In addition, since an Index will inherently involve subjective steps, hardly avoidable when dealing with social aspects, we attempted to represent the value system of the ILO, which one can consider as being based on an international consensus.

Our characterization model aims to assign a score representing the adequacy of the salaries expected for the countries involved in the life cycle of a product; the score of the index being the indicator of the subcategory “salary”.

Finally, the Index is tested on the product system of the Québec greenhouse tomato. The subcategory indicator is attached to the product system using a model proposed for the Life Cycle Attribute Assessment (LCAA), but recognized as being adequate for SLCA in the Guidelines for SLCA. The case study gives a platform to discuss the signification of the values once attributed to a product life cycle.

If our work focused on a single subcategory, the method used to build the Index might be relevant to develop others characterization models.

 

Quantifying and assessing working environment related social aspects along product lifecycles – the LCWE approach
Jan Paul Lindner, Stuttgart University
Tabea Beck, Stuttgart University
Ulrike Bos, Stuttgart University
Cecilia Makishi Colodel, Stuttgart University
presentation

The integration of working environment related social aspect into life cycle oriented sustainability assessments provides important information for decision makers in policy, society and industry and helps to identify trade-offs between environmental and social impacts.

In the method developed at the University of Stuttgart, Department of Life Cycle Engineering, the sectoral and the process based approach as mentioned in the Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment are combined: Industry sector specific statistical data from national censuses is gathered and allocated to process level. The assumptions this allocation is acting on are that the social impacts of a process are related to the amount of human labour of the process. Furthermore, the amount of human labour of a process is related to the effort made to add value by processing (which is equivalent to the added-value itself). Based on this allocation the approach enables both the use of statistical data on social aspects and the aggregation of process specific data along the life cycle of products. The basis for the aggregation and the weighting of the processes is working time.

The indicators developed so far are qualified working time distinguishing different general qualification levels, total working time as well as lethal and non-lethal accidents. For all these indicators process specific data has been generated and integrated into the GaBi software system enabling the assessment of the impacts also including background systems.

The methodology and data have been employed in different projects in parallel to conventional LCAs and have demonstrated their viability.

In the presentation the LCWE methodology including the development of the indicators will be presented. The generation of process specific data from industry sectoral statistical data will be elaborated and a case study will be shown with the respective results.