A Flexible Tool for social LCA incl. aspects of environmental damage and added value

1. Context SLCA still faces the issue of how to best quantify the results for ease of analysis in comparative assessments. The SHDB has been implemented in various software as an operational tool. However, it remains at the... [ view full abstract ]

1. Context
SLCA still faces the issue of how to best quantify the results for ease of analysis in comparative assessments. The SHDB has been implemented in various software as an operational tool. However, it remains at the level of work hours at different risk levels, which is difficult to evaluate. While LCA is quantifying and aggregating different environmental concerns, SLCA still needs guidance on how to best do this.
2. Objectives,
The objective is to provide a flexible tool that allows quantifying both, work hours and aggregated risks, allowing for many choices on the selection of risks and weighting of risk levels. Furthermore, the goal is to include other aspects such as social benefits from added value and social impacts from environmental damage, to broaden the analysis from-work hour related impacts to a more complete view on the whole society.
3. Methodology/approach,
In order to account for environmental stressors and added value, we used the MRIO database Exiobase v2.2.2, which is to a large extent compatible with the GTAP MRIO model underlying the SHDB. The sector and country match for risks of SHDB and Exiobase is already included in the tool allowing to link risks with added value results as well as environmental impacts of most important stressors, based on a single system model. The tool is programmed in “python” and includes predefined selection and weighting sets for quantifying the different social impacts. However, since more research is needed in this field, the tool allows selecting custom values to adjust the social impact assessment. Additionally, the tool also displays the results of working hours, added value and environmental impacts without risk weighting. Optionally, we included normalization in order to better compare the results of the three dimensions working hours, added value and environmental damage.
4. Findings and contributions.
We applied the tool to T-shirt production and sale systems and found that it is relevant to account for different aspects of social impact, since the three dimensions showed a different picture. Obviously the added value occurs mainly in the sales sector (mainly Germany in our cases), while impacts related to environment and work hours occurs in the cotton and textile producing countries (Bangladesh and the US in our cases). Since the tool is freeware, it will help researchers to further test different quantification schemes, but also allow practitioners to analyze product systems with pre-defined or custom selection and weighting sets.