Process based assessment of working place related social impacts of products – Life Cycle Working Environment (LCWE)

In recent years the topic of social aspects of value chains has gained increasing attention not only in the LCA research community but also in industries. Questions arise on how social impacts can be measured and assessed to... [ view full abstract ]

In recent years the topic of social aspects of value chains has gained increasing attention not only in the LCA research community but also in industries. Questions arise on how social impacts can be measured and assessed to meet compliance requirements and reporting standards especially regarding working conditions and human rights. For these purposes information is required on social impacts of the whole supply chain of products analogue to LCA. Therefore a process based approach to assess social impacts is needed to allow a detailed consideration of relevant indicators regarding their hotspots along the value chain and their geographical location. Latest methods and databases have contributed greatly to advance the feasibility and validity of sLCA. Despite this progress major challenges are still ahead. Two of these challenges are data availability and the referencing to processes or to the functional unit respectively. The department of Life Cycle Engineering developed a sLCA method called Life Cycle Working Environment (LCWE) to address these specific issues. The basic idea of the LCWE approach is to combine economic information included in product system models with either statistical data or primary data to calculate social profiles of processes. The assignment of processes to branches is taken as a basis. According to this assignment statistical data can be accounted on the process. The link is operationalized by allocating the statistical information to the process by the ratio of the value added to the working time needed for a process. This operation is based on the assumption that social impacts occur proportional to working time and that working time is proportional to the value added of a sector.
The process based results can then be aggregated along the value chain creating an overall social profile of the assessed product. The data base used for LCWE has recently been updated using statistics from EUROSTAT. The structure and data is compatible to GaBi LCI data. First case studies conducted confirm the applicability of the method. It allows the process based evaluation of workplace related social issues along the whole value chain by combining primary and secondary data. Socio-scientific questions such as consumer satisfaction or acceptance related to the use phase are out of scope of the method.
Using product system models as a basis for the assessment of social impacts shows great advantage, as LCA, LCC and LCWE can be evaluated within the same system models including boundaries and scenarios.