ABSTRACT. Poor people do not have access to proper sanitation and suffer health problems. To choose the right facilities is embarrassing because many factors interact. What are the effects of sanitation access on child mortality? What is the hierarchy of factors influencing its benefits? We provide a pathway after (Headey and Palloni, 2019) on data from 442 regions in 59 countries, and propose a gradation of beneficial effects according to the risk factors present. In average, the 100 % increase in sanitation coverage is associated with a decrease in under-5 mortality of between 34 and 38 per 1,000 births. Locally, the real improvement depends on the starting context (Burger and Esrey, 1995). High rates of infant mortality, no breastfeeding, illiterate mothers, less than three basic hygienic practices, few water available, partial breastfeeding, are situations in which the introduction of sanitation will bring the most progress.

ABSTRACT. The conventional type-1 indicators used in social life cycle assessment have mathematical problems related to aggregation of impacts along product life cycles. This contribution therefore proposes three time-based, quantitative type-2 indicators: (i) the share of the life-cycle labour hours of a product conducted as forced labour, (ii) the share of labour hours conducted locally, and (iii) the share of labour hours conducted by the two genders (females and males). These indicators all have the unit time (e.g. hours) and capture the three subcategories forced labour, local employment and (partly) equal opportunity, respectively. Forced labour and local employment both constitute shares of the total life-cycle labour hours, whereas the shares of labour hours conducted by females and males respectively make up the total labour hours. The absolute values of these indicators can be used for product comparisons, but their distribution along product life cycles might be even more interesting.

ABSTRACT. Impact valuation is considered by many as the best approach to measure and value the effects of business activities because of its potential to facilitate comparability and communication of results across different companies and sectors. The Handbook for Product Social Impact Assessments (PSIA) has developed a proven method that provides a clear and consensus-based methodology to qualitatively assess potential social impacts of products and services throughout the life-cycle of creation, use and disposal. In the initial process, no formal guiding principles were proposed in order to pass from qualitative results on the scales-based approach to quantitative results in monetary units. We explore the creation of an approach that will enable PSIA’s framework users to systematically monetize the qualitative results of their assessments. Through literature review and case studies, we’ve developed a monetization methodology whose foundations could be relevant for each of PSIA stakeholder groups and social topics.

ABSTRACT. Most type II social life cycle impact assessment (S-LCIA) approaches analyzing the cause-effect chains follow a top-down approach, focusing only on some social variables. In addition, most of these methods still lack investigating the root causes of social issues that should be focused on to improve the social sustainability of systems, while focusing only on latter parts of the chains (impacts of social issues).The aim of this study is to explore the use of the Driver-pressure-state-impact-response (DPSIR) framework for analyzing the cause-effect chains associated with social issues in S-LCA. The approach taken in this study to build the cause-effect pathways in S-LCA is significant due to its bottom-up approach, considering all subcategories and from its analysis of cause-effect chains of social aspects using Quality Adjusted Life Years. This will help propose efficient solutions through changing the underlying causes, i.e. the social aspects from S-LCA.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this article is present a Type II method, with a cause-effect chain and characterization model based on the subcategories of the SLCA. The method was developed following three steps: Step 1 - Definition of Area of Protection (AoP); Step 2 - Choice of the estimation technique; Step 3 - Development of the cause-effect chain and characterization model. Thus, Human well-being was defined as AoP, more specifically the effects of the subcategories on endpoint Life Expectancy at birth (LEX); it was identified that the techniques of Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) would be the most appropriate. The database used includes data to 21 indicators, representing 15 subcategories related to 4 stakeholders. Through EFA and SEM was possible to identify two impact pathways starting from "Income and competitiveness" and "Access to material resources and healthy living conditions" which have effect at the end point LEX.

ABSTRACT. The case study regards the sustainability assessment of a conventional abattoir located in Norway versus an innovative concept of slaughtering based on human-robot collaboration. The S-LCA method was used in the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment framework. The S-LCA was carried out by a generic assessment through a hot spot analysis using the PSILCA database for assessing the animal feed production and a specific assessment for evaluating the social impacts at the slaughterhouse. The innovative concept is still a hypothetical case; thus, the results are based on the assumptions made by experts. The results indicate that the social impact of the innovative concept might be lower than the conventional abattoir, due to lower risk of injuries and incidents, less physically demanding work and request of higher competence leading to higher salary. On the other hand, this may lead to loss of jobs especially for lower qualified workers.

ABSTRACT. The goal of this work is to use S-LCA in process development and value chain creation. In this paper we present the results from using Materiality Assessment and PSILCA database and give some reflections on how stakeholders in the value chain of new bio-based materials understand the results.

The materiality assessment was used to identify the most relevant social indicators for the stakeholders along the value chain. The stakeholders with a stronger insight on what is considered relevant for the forestry industry were chosen. The relevant indicators were then applied in the assessment of the new bio-based materials.

The PSILCA database was used to assess the social impacts and govern the value chain of new bio-based materials. Based on the feedback from the stakeholders in the three research projects, it was difficult to understand and use the assessment since the social impacts were presented in from of medium risk hours.

ABSTRACT. The challenge of assessing emerging activities has been increasingly discussed in the field of Life Cycle Assessment. Arvidsson et al. (2018) proposed a methodology for an environmental study, as for the social aspect until then this option was not explored. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to select indicators that have prospective characteristics. Three ASCV studies were selected and compared with the generic indicators proposed by UNEP / SETAC in the document “The Methodological Sheets for Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA)” (Benoit et al., 2011). As a result, 26 indicators were selected for the five S-LCA stakeholder groups. These indicators were applied in Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden. Sweden achieved the best results; Brazil, the worst. From indicator selections such as this one, it is expected that more SLCA studies will be applied in decision making or area diagnosis, allowing its growth and advancement of the tool.

ABSTRACT. Social Life Cycle Assessment is a methodology developed in order to assess the negative and positive social and socio-economic impacts of products and services, along their life cycle (Benoît et al., 2013). Therefore, when performing an S-LCA of a product or service, the companies or enterprises being part of the supply chain become object of the assessment as well.

Several studies (Lehmann et al., 2013; Souza et al., 2018; Valente et al., 2018; Zamani et al., 2018) have focused on the identification of hotspots along supply chains, and the definition of a methodological framework to assess the social impacts of novel technologies (van Haaster et al., 2017). The main aim of this study is to assess the social impact of the potential supply chain of a novel product, by using the S-LCA as assessing methodology.

ABSTRACT. The environmental and social urgencies of the climate crisis demand for innovative solutions, able to match the supply of food, feed and fuel with the demand of the world's increasing population in a sustainable way. Aquatic feedstock can be a solution to these needs: in particular, algae are among the most promising feedstock for the production of food and feed, and the extraction of bulk and fine chemicals for a range of applications. However, the EU algae feedstock market still requires further developments and investments, and the investigation of the environmental and social consequences. This contribution is aimed at presenting the approach and the results for the identification and evaluation of the social materiality aspects of algae-based products in the food, feed and cosmetic sector, with the Social LCA methodology. In particular, the process of stakeholder engagement will be discussed, together with the approach adopted for measuring the social performances.

ABSTRACT. Nowadays human rights issues cannot be considered a matter to be handled only at a public level. Indeed, globalization has emphasized the incapacity of States to prevent or address the adverse impacts on human rights caused by business activities in global supply chains. That is the reason why business enterprise should carry out a human rights due diligence. The present work aims at investigating, from a theoretical point of view, the potential role of Social Life Cycle Assessment in supporting business enterprises in the assessment of human rights for the purpose of human rights due diligence.

ABSTRACT. SLCA according to the UNEP/SETAC guidelines attempt to measure the social impacts of a product or policy with human well-being as endpoint indicator. However, the methodological sheets do not provide clear and unambiguous definition of what human well-being is and are lacking with regard to a weak capacity to identify reliable indicators to include in both Type I and Type 2 impact assessment. The aim of this article is to explore the chance to introduce ‘community resilience’ (e.g. Magis 2013) as new topic for assessment in the SLCA, compared to human well-being (Soltanpour et al., 2019). The concept of community resilience is investigated via literature to understand how it can be related to ‘human well-being’ expressed in the guidelines and how it can be operationalized for impact assessment. Results will show the possibility of community resilience assessment in SLCA for both Type I and Type 2 assessment.

ABSTRACT. The present study focuses on application of S-LCA at the macro scale, with the aim of assessing its potential relevance and use in energy development scenarios. The methodology used in this research extends the methodological approach introduced by Lekavičius et al. (2019) by including an additional module developed for the evaluation of specific social impacts. The results of the research include a broad range of social and related indicators that are derived from the core models directly or using supplementary data. In this research, we used existing models and the energy sector as an example, but the intention is to extend the methodology to be able to cover different types of production processes. In this context, the universal nature of life cycle analysis provides necessary preconditions for the analysis of changing production processes in different industries, while computable general equilibrium modelling can provide economically justified grounds for changing intersectoral relationships.

ABSTRACT. The complexity of social indicators and their subjective and often qualitative nature render the inclusion of social indicators into quantitative optimization models for supply network design intricate. In a first work, we review 91 articles that apply social indicators to objective functions in strategic supply network optimization. We find that the number of jobs created is often the only indicator employed. For objective functions with more than one indicator, most articles weigh towards a dimensionless social score. In a second work, we integrate these findings into two optimization models with hitherto economic and LCIA-based environmental objective functions. The first represents the case of European WEEE recovery, and the second represents a European supply network for lignocellulosic bioethanol from agricultural residues. We aim to achieve two goals: 1) What are conflicts and congruencies between the three pillars of sustainability? 2) How does the case study affect the array of includable indicators?

ABSTRACT. We aim to provide better understanding of opportunities for SLCA use. We report on interviews with representatives of 11 major organizations in Sweden with considerable focus on life-cycles. The organizations are found only to a considerably limited degree to have applied SLCA. The findings also indicate an SLCA potential due to a considerable focus on social issues and because other methods only cover short parts of product chains. Identified challenges with the methodology are SLCA not handling sustainability aspects such as from a global perspective over time, SLCA being costly to use, SLCA not handling the context dependent and rapidly changing social impacts well, SLCA maybe being too flexible regarding the user excluding indicators, and maybe SLCA addressing industries rather than the retailers to which it could matter more, among other. Due to the life-cycle interest in the organizations and Sweden, the findings can be of broader relevance.

ABSTRACT. We learned from the implementation of environmental LCA in the nineties, that companies start with ad-hoc case studies to understand the approach and to assess the potential business value of such a new metric . Often this first case study is rather unstructured if not chaotic; at least it is not a very efficient process, as people have to spend time discussing and thinking about ways to collect, structure and understand the data.

The goal of this paper is to describe the process that led to the Implementation Guidebook developed in 2019 with the Product Social Metrics Roundtable. The objective of this guide is to develop a structured approach to develop the in house capabilities and procedures to speed up the implementation process.

ABSTRACT. DSM is one of the founders of Roundtable for Product Social Metrics and is currently assessing several product lines against social indicators which is a joint effort of multiple functions within the company. These studies help to engage the organization to apply the methodology and steer the Sustainable Product Portfolio by identifying areas of improvements. As a result of these studies a framework for product social metrics for companies (namely large corporations) was developed. The framework is defined by three levels of assurance: 1. Ensure policy is in place 2. Ensure methodology is available 3. Ensure clear process to assess product social metrics Presenting this case study has the intention to show the learnings from the process and implementation of improvements internally and externally.