ABSTRACT. The main purpose of this review is to describe the state of the art of social impact assessment with a focus on mobility services. Whereas the use phase plays an important role for the assessment of services in general, the evaluation of the use phase has been underrepresented in previous S-LCA studies. For that reason, a systematic literature review was carried out with a focus on methodology and social indicators that allow to assess use phase impacts in general and more in detail of mobility services. The indicators where analyzed, allocated to stakeholder groups and clustered into categories in order to identify hotspots as well as weaknesses. Subsequently, a core set of indicators was defined, taking into account expert judgements and data availability, to lead the way towards a comprehensive and inclusive set of indicators for the assessment of mobility services.

ABSTRACT. The present work aims at assessing the social and socio-economic aspects of a jar of honey along its life cycle by using the Product Social Impact Life Cycle Assessment database (PSILCA) and processing data already collected for Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) case studies. An attempt was made in order to analyse in parallel the PSILCA assessment method along with the results already obtained by having used the Subcategory Assessment Method (SAM). This revealed a series of methodological and applicative observations also in terms of highlighting the limits of each one of the methods with respect to the other.

ABSTRACT. Social LCA is increasingly used for assessing social impacts along supply chains; especially the calculation of life cycle results was however often questioned by practitioners. Social indicators can be qualitative, or ordinal, and thus are not directly “accessible” in a life cycle calculation which requires quantitative indicators. Databases created for calculating social impacts along life cycles are therefore today using “activity variables”, where worker hours spent in each process are used to quantify the risk-assessed social indicators. This allows to calculate any social indicator over the life cycle, but worker hours are not necessarily linked to indicators for other stakeholders than workers and thus could “scale” the indicators in an inappropriate way. We propose and showcase an approach to directly quantify social indicators in LCA models and databases, and hope this contributes to a wider uptake of social LCA, overcoming one common bottlneck in understanding and communicating social LCA reslts.

ABSTRACT. Given the role of batteries for achieving carbon reduction objectives, ensuring that materials for batteries are sourced responsibly is a crucial policy objective. Some initiatives for responsible sourcing of cobalt (a material used in cathodes) have been launched in the last months. A primary data collection was performed in the DRC copper and cobalt artisanal mining sector in the Haut-Katanga and Lualaba area. Data collection was based on standards in the sustainability and responsible sourcing area as well as on S-LCA guidelines. The study aimed to understand the local conditions of two pilot projects on responsible sourcing compared to the current local situation of ASM and in the same time to implement the S-LCA guidelines throughout the development of a gathering matrix to understand their feasibility in assessing ASM.

ABSTRACT. This submission presents life cycle based social hotspots analysis done for a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) funded project on mapping the textile value chain, identifying key hotspots at the global level and assessing trade barriers & opportunities. Functional unit for the study was global textile annual production. Impacts were calculated based on the yearly consumption per capita using data from The Fiber year 2017, World Apparel Life Cycle Database, and ecoinvent, combining them with the Social Hotspots Database for evaluating social hotspots. Results show high importance of the fibre production phase and high risks of social impacts in Asian countries where most of the textile production takes place. Based on the data, and complemented with additional research and stakeholder consultations, UNEP is publishing a report on sustainability and circularity in Textile value chains in early 2020. Priorities identified in this report to address the social hotspots will also be presented.

ABSTRACT. The policy intentions written by the chair of the new European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen signals the intention to announce a new Green Deal in the first 100 days after November 1st . According to these intentions this Green Deal will include improving social conditions in the Life Cycle of products on the European Market. Although much is still unclear, this would require a Social LCA approach that can fulfil the requirements such policies require.

The goal of this presentation is to start the discussion on what the main requirements are in order to make the approach robust en practicable enough to support such a policy and to investigate what is needed to further strengthen social LCA approaches, that can be used in a policy context.

ABSTRACT. Boosted by impressive technological innovation and cost reductions, renewable energy in a growing number of countries is now primarily considered for its social and economic benefits. Among the renewable energy promotion actions at the global level, photovoltaic poverty alleviation program in China is very unique since the targeted users are villagers in poverty regions. Under this condition, it would be quite necessary to understand how are the photovoltaic poverty alleviation program carrying out? Are the local villagers really benefiting from the photovoltaic application? How to evaluate the social benefits of renewable energy application? In this study, three poverty villages are selected in the northwestern part of China to conduct the social impact analysis. An evaluation system including four categories and twelve indicators was established. Site investigation and questionnaire interview was carried out to collect required information. Recommendations for improving the renewable energies based on the findings are also proposed.

ABSTRACT. Since consumers are more frequently questioning where, by whom and under what conditions products are being produced, more transparency is required in public procurement. With the implementation of Green Public Procurement and the Directive 2014/24/EU, public institutions have been progressively introducing criteria into calls for tenders, including environmental, social, work conditions and innovation aspects, in order to boost sustainability being achieved in the production and consumption market. From the social perspective of sustainability, the guidelines proposed by UNEP/SETAC established the Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) framework, incorporating indicators aimed at measuring the human wellbeing. But, how S-LCA criteria is being implemented in public procurement in real practice? The Spanish furniture sector was selected as a case study to explore this concern and lack of commitment from both the public and private sectors was identified, concluding that more efforts should be made to cover the wellbeing of all stakeholders involved.

ABSTRACT. Reuse of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) is among the top priorities in the EU waste hierarchy. In order to enhance the public perception towards the reuse of electric appliances and the prevention of electronic waste generation in Greece, an initiative has been undertaken by a group of partners. In the framework of this initiative, two sorting centers are established and operating in order to prepare EEE for reuse.

The aim of this manuscript is the presentation of the key parameters that need to be taken into account in order to assess the social impact resulting from the operation of the two sorting centers for EEE reuse in Greece via means of social LCA.

ABSTRACT. Qatar faces up to a lack of domestic capability for food production, which makes the nation highly relying on neighboring Gulf countries for importing foods to meet the increasing food demand. However, a recent GCC crisis followed by the Qatar blockade has drastically changed a global trade of food supplies resulting in serious social challenges for the country. This study presents new insights for the resilience of Qatar's food industry considering the socioeconomic and environmental consequences of the blockade considering the national and world-level impacts. A global multiregional input-output analysis is used for analyzing impacts on the regional and global supply chains of Qatar considering the role of global trade. The proposed method provides vital insights for policymakers to analyze the positive and negative regional and global supply chain impacts of the embargo in terms of main social sustainability indicators such as employment, economic value-added, self-sufficiency, and human health impacts.

ABSTRACT. In a time of climate crisis, it becomes important to understand product flows, and how human action and interactions enable and shape these flows. Financial actors are one of the most important forces in product chains. However, their influence and interactions with other actors and their link with environmental and social issues have seldom been elaborated in the life cycle literature. Given the complex socio-ecological problems of global product chains, current methods are lacking the ability to capture the width of the problem for analysis and solutions. The aim of this contribution is to present, develop, testing and evaluating an integrative and comprehensive methodology, covering the actor-network around material flows by combining LCA, PCO and financial chains. Combining different approaches, such a method aims at providing a richer description of actors involved in different steps of the life cycle, complementing the current vision of CSR-based S-LCA.

ABSTRACT. Studying social impact risks associated with activities is a necessary step for companies wishing to establish a risk management strategy with a strong social sustainability component. The minimisation of these risks will require interventions at different levels of stakeholders and the end goal be fully understood by all.

The present study considered the potential social impacts of using previously underutilized proteins from sidestreams for novel food applications, as described through two assessment methods: Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) and Social Impact Risk Mapping (SIRM). The aim of the study was twofold: (a) contribute to the development of the SIRM approach, and (b) highlight the synergies between SLCA and SIRM to provide actionable inputs for a company’s risk management plan and an easy-to-understand representation of the risks to increase stakeholder understanding and buy-in

ABSTRACT. The impacts of mining can strongly influence the life of the mining communities and workers. Therefore, the social acceptance of a mining site is crucial to ensure that the interests, needs and livelihood of local stakeholders are considered. The term Social License to Operate (SLO) has emerged to summarise the stakeholders’ acceptance. This work explores the influence of impacts from mining, and company’s behaviour on the SLO for the EU Horizon 2020 ITERAMS project, with the goal to identify the potential influence on SLO of the novel technologies proposed in the project. The results show that the ITERAMS solutions can clearly contribute to gaining SLO, because of the reduction of issues related to access to material resources and safe and healthy living conditions. If the company’s behaviour goes beyond the implementation of technologies by enhancing stakeholders’ engagement and considering their opinions in decision making the social acceptance becomes higher.

ABSTRACT. British Columbia (BC), the westernmost province of Canada, is superficially similar to the Nordic countries: it has large areas of forest and, potentially, a large supply of biomass. Economic and environmental analyses have shown that using waste woody biomass, currently left unused by the forest products industry, as fuel could make a significant contribution to decarbonising the province’s economy. However, development of the bioenergy sector has been slow and limited; even applications which should already be economically attractive, helped by BC’s high carbon tax, have not been pursued. The development appears to be inhibited by lack of “agglomerators” who gather scattered supplies of biomass to provide a reliable supply to potential users. This contribution will explore how governance aspects combine unintentionally to prevent the development of the sector. Of particular interest are the laws governing land tenure and access, which differ radically from the traditions in the Nordic countries.

ABSTRACT. The UNEP/SETAC guidelines encourage researches in order to overcome some methodological issues related to Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA). Possible problems regard the operationalization and measurement of social indicators usually based on the corporate social responsibility structure and on political standards and conventions. To face these issues, possible contributes may come from the adoption of a theoretical and methodological pluralism approach based on social sciences. The aim of this study is to investigate on how social sciences may orient SLCA practitioners towards the development of new indicators related to human well-being. Focusing on social sciences, a literature review will be performed in order to see how human well-being is defined according to the several disciplines and what may be its possible indicators. Expected results regard a deeper knowledge of social realities and an increased awareness of how social sciences could contribute to develop the SLCA.

ABSTRACT. We present results from our recently published Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) supported Social Cost-Benefit Analysis (SCBA) of establishing a large food waste treating biomethanation plant in Mumbai, India. The food waste is anaerobically digested, and biogas produced is upgraded to compressed biomethane (CBM) and used as fuel to operate transit buses within the city. The SCBA results indicate that CBM driven buses can save 6.86 billion Indian rupees (USD 99.4 million) annually for Mumbai. The savings are made due to a reduction in fuel cost coupled with environmental externality costs if entire transit bus fleet operates on CBM fuel instead of current fuel mix (33:67 diesel to CNG). Also, the sustainable and private rate of returns of using CBM as a fuel to operate transit buses is much higher than passenger cars. The bus riders from lower income class can benefit significantly when Mumbai uses more sustainable CBM fuel.

ABSTRACT. One of the challenges in Social LCA is the broad scope of impacts to consider. A screening S-LCA was conducted with PSILCA in parallel to Environmental-LCA in a R&D-project with the aim to raise awareness on Social issues and to identify important impacts in the product value chain. A workshop was conducted inspired by the Open Space method where project participants prioritized the social impact categories. This approach raised awareness on social issues of resource use, but the selection of impact categories clearly did not represent workers or consumers as stakeholders and overlapped the E-LCA. After a review, few categories were added to counter this. An improvement of the approach is to pre-screen all impact categories and focus on those that show very high risk, high risk or no data in the workshop. That promotes active engagement of project participants as well as improving the expert assessment in the scoping.

ABSTRACT. Rare earth elements (REE) are important minerals for modern day energy technologies. For example, permanent magnets based on neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) are often used in wind power plants. The majority of rare earth elements are mined in China. In particular, ion adsorption clays (IAC) contain the greatest amount of heavy REE, like dysprosium (Dy), and are only mined in three provinces in southern China. In these mines both legal and illegal miners work. Aim of the current research is to give insight into the social implications of Dy production with respect to workers’ pay and working time. This is achieved by means of a Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA). A former S-LCA assessing the social hotspots of permanent magnet production is adapted with more site-specific data. For the assessment, the PSILCA 2.0 database is used. Especially the working time of illegal miners seems to be an issue.

ABSTRACT. are rare. This paper presents a framework able to structure the subcategory indicators selection process to be included into a SLCA study, providing a customized list based on the product analyzed. This approach was developed in a participative perspective, including stakeholders’ point of view on this decision-making process. We propose two different approaches to establish the list of customized subcategory indicators, based on the value judgment of stakeholders and social context of product’s life cycle. Both models present benefits and challenges. For the first one, it is necessary that the stakeholders’ representatives have an in-depth knowledge about local community social issues in order to be able to be used as decision-makers on our approach. The second model is easier to be implemented and is able to consider a lager point of view of stakeholders’ sample.

ABSTRACT. The Social Hot Spot Assessment is a module of our Social analysis. It follows in the first step the environmental LCA and Social LCA, the definition of system boundaries. If a Social LCA is available, the system boundaries can be used again and vice versa. In the next step, possible life cycle steps are identified that might be relevant for a deep dive of specific social hot spots. In the assessment process of the whole supply chain the most significant life cycle step(s) is/are identified and highlighted. The identification of possible life cycle steps does not follow a mass-oriented approach, because even small volumes of materials can cause high impacts on social aspects. Because of the deep dive of the method, a limited number of life cycle steps is assessed. The goal of this module is the identification of hot spots that are important for the marketing of a product.

ABSTRACT. Water2REturn is a Circular Economy project co-funded by the European Commission under its Horizon 2020 programme. Goal of the project is to implement an integrated solution for slaughterhouse wastewater treatment, recovering nutrients to produce biogas for slaughterhouse operations and to manufacture organic-sourced fertilisers and biostimulants for agriculture. The Water2Return technology is being developed at Matadero del Sur, a slaughterhouse in Salteras, Andalusia (Spain) a region well known for the challenges it faces in terms of water scarcity. The role of Social LCA within this project is to integrate the environmental and economic assessment with social criteria in the development of the Water2Return technology. The methodology chosen for the assessment is the latest version of the Handbook for Product Social Impact Assessment (Goedkoop, K.J.; Indrane, D.; de Beer,I.M; Product Social Impact Assessment Handbook -2018) to evaluate the wastewater treatment at Matadero del Sur and the developments introduced by the Water2Return technology.

ABSTRACT. Directive 2014/95/EU arose from the need to improve the dissemination of non-financial information of organizations, relating to social and environmental factors. This study is focused on analysing the communication of the social performance of organizations through their Sustainability Reports, from two different perspectives: what social indicators are being communicated by companies and which metrics are using for that. The aim is to perform an initial diagnosis for the case study of Spanish organizations, in order to identify patterns related to the type and number of social indicators. Finally, the relationship between the social indicators communicated and the categories/subcategories considered in the Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products proposed by UNEP/SETAC is analysed. This would be useful to identify which UNEP/SETAC categories/subcategories are already being communicated by organizations and potential gaps.

ABSTRACT. This research investigates methodologies of Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) and Green Building Certification Systems (GBCS) along with the European standard EN 16309 for social performance assessment for buildings. We follow a two-step approach of first reviewing methods used to perform an S-LCA in the literature and then comparing the methods to GBCS and EN 16309 regarding their coverage of S-LCA subcategories. Two fundamental differences lie in the targeted life cycle stages and stakeholders. UNEP/SETAC guidelines for S-LCA tend to be dominant in the “production” stage, whereas, GBCS and EN 16309 focus predominantly on the “use” stage of the lifecycle. GBCS and EN 16309 methodologies focus on the “consumer” (building occupant) and “local community” stakeholders. Extending the scope of the rating systems across more stakeholders and life cycle stages to include S-LCA subcategories could lead to greater awareness and application of the S-LCA concept in the building and construction sector.

ABSTRACT. Olive growing is the most important agricultural activity in Italy, representing, in 2010, 56% of Italian farms and 76% of land used for permanent crops. Producing high-quality products, such as healthy and socially responsible produces, while containing costs, is the current market challenge, and evaluation tools are of utmost importance to help farmers shaping management practices to obtain competitive products. This study applies Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and social Life Cycle Assessment (sLCA) as evaluation tools to compare the socio-economic impacts of organic and conventional farming systems of the Italian olive growing. Results showed a similar level of economic profitability in both scenarios, due to the public subsidies for organic farming, which balanced higher production costs. From a social point of view, some differences have been highlighted: organic farming would be suitable not only to increase incomes but also to improve the occupational health of the people involved.

ABSTRACT. In 2018, the Renewable Energy Directive has established a compulsory target of 3.5 % of advanced biofuels as share of final consumption of energy in the transport sector in 2030 in the EU. A biorefinery for producing lignocellulosic ethanol established in continental Croatia would contribute to fulfil this target. Potential social impacts of such production were assessed by expert consultation for the foreground model and using the database SOCA for the background processes. This combination allowed for a deeper analysis at local level and simultaneously the analysis of suppliers located in further regions. Results suggest that the project would generate jobs and foster agricultural production at local level. Potential negative impacts might arise from the biorefinery construction and operation, affecting workers and the local community. Besides, taking into account suppliers at international level, social issues would mainly come from the chemical industry.

ABSTRACT. In order to demonstrate the sustainability of new chemicals, several analyses were performed within the EU Life projects TRIALKYL and IREPRO, such as the health assessment, life cycle assessment and socio-economic analysis. The goal of this work is to better understand the socio-economic effects of the introduction of new chemicals on the market.

The ECHA guidance methodology was chosen to perform the socio-economic analysis. The evaluation includes economic, health, environmental and social impacts. In order to improve the social assessment in the ECHA guidance methodology, other methods might be of help. The Social LCA might be a suitable method to assess and the social impacts.

In this paper we present the results from two research projects using the SEA methodology based on ECHA and give some suggestions on using social metrics developed for chemical sector also for the ECHA guideline regarding social and societal issues of new chemicals.

ABSTRACT. The main goal of this study is to provide a method that supports the implementation of Social Organisational Life Cycle Assessment starting from the identification of relevant social issues for each stakeholder to be assessed. For this purpose, a participatory approach, i.e. the Pugh Matrix, for assessing the social performance of an organisation is proposed. Pugh Matrix is a two-dimensional matrix that allows m alternatives, i.e. different subcategories, to be compared by means of a set of j evaluation criteria. In the matrix, pairwise alternatives are compared by assigning a score based on defined evaluation criteria. Pugh matrix was submitted to stakeholders from industry and academia via interviews for a better understanding of the evaluation carried out. The outcomes proved that Pugh Matrix is enabled of considering the expectations of different stakeholders and knowing the needs which are to be pursued for the well-being of people.

ABSTRACT. This poster aims to propose a possible integration of science communication debates, on deficit, dialogue and participation between different actors, experts and non-experts, in the study of social LCA. The purpose of such an integration stems from the understanding that through the product chain, there are a wide variety of actors that enable the material product to "flow" and that are working with scientific and sustainability-relevant information. This abstract first discusses the key arguments that evolved in science communication debates especially in the last decades leading up to the more recent deliberations on participation, and then proposes reasons why it could be worthwhile to combine these arguments in the growing literature on social LCA. It uses Oatly, the Swedish oat milk company, and the types of communication in its product chain, as the case study to argue the relevance of science communication scholarly frameworks in social LCA.