Social Life Cycle Assessment

The social life-cycle assessment is a study like environmental life-cycle assessment focused on the impact of an activity in social environment. The social impact can be defined as the impact on worker life-stile, working environment, the health of workers, but also on the impact on the population.

For example for citeSujet{kafa_cigi_2013}, it can take into account the commitment of the enterprise, customer satisfaction or the performance of workers. Different criteria are taken into account in a social life-cycle assessment. citeSujet{dreyer_framework_2006} quote some social policies for the social LCA from some companies: job creation, local/national recruitment, generation of employment and technology development, simulation of economic

This is probably due to the complexity and diversity of the social issues that depend on the type of activity or on the sector of application. There is a lack of theoretical underpinnings like for the environmental dimension twenty years ago. item As underlined in the Prosuite project citeRefer{blok2013handbook} the social indicator are more complex. Indeed, for the environmental impact, each indicator is minimized and its magnitude is related on the quantities. But for the social indicators, the desired direction can be different, for instance: to increase employment and to decrease poverty. The magnitude of social indicators is more difficult to evaluate also because of the multiplicity of input data required and not always

For instance, for human rights (respectively corruption) it is not always obvious to clearly establish rights violation (respectively to demonstrate corruption). citeSujet{perret_indicateurs_2002} asks if it is possible to estimate the social impact without using moral judgement or political view and what kind of goods have to be taken into account for this. In the Prosuite project the qualitative social indicator are evaluated through expert knowledge that reduced subjectivity but it is still present. item Involved in a social approach, every improvement has necessarily an environmental character, and conversely. Some indicators such as human health, food to energy, safety have an influence on the two previous dimensions. It is now well established that these indicators on the border between social and environmental dimensions are estimated within life cycle assessment. Furthermore, this approach permits to increase the number of quantitative evaluations. item The availability of input data to evaluate the social indicators is often the major bottleneck. Combined with the third point, it also raises the question of the uncertainty in this