Abstract
Background, aim, and scope
The authors have suggested earlier a framework for life cycle impact assessment to form the modelling basis of social LCA. In this framework, the fundamental labour rights were pointed out as obligatory issues to be addressed, and protection and promotion of human dignity and well-being as the ultimate goal and area of protection of social LCA. The intended main application of this framework for social LCA was to support management decisions in companies who wish to conduct business in a socially responsible manner, by providing information about the potential social impacts on people caused by the activities in the life cycle of a product. Environmental LCA normally uses quantitative and comparable indicators to provide a simple representation of the environmental impacts from the product lifecycle. This poses a challenge to the social LCA framework because due to their complexity, many social impacts are difficult to capture in a meaningful way using traditional quantitative single-criterion indicators. A salient example is the violation of fundamental labour rights (child labour, discrimination, freedom of association, and right to organise and collective bargaining, forced labour). Furthermore, actual violations of these rights somewhere in the product chain are very difficult to substantiate and hence difficult to measure directly.
Materials and methods
Based on a scorecard, a multi-criteria indicator model has been developed for assessment of a number of social impact categories. The multi-criteria indicator assesses the effort (will and ability) of a company to manage the individual issues, and it calculates a score reflecting the company’s performance in a form which allows aggregation over the life cycle of the product. The multi-criteria indicator model is presented with labour rights as an example, but the underlying principles make it suitable for modelling of other social issues with similar complexity and susceptibility to a management approach.
Results
The outcome of the scorecard is translated for each impact category through a number of steps into a company performance score, which is translated into a risk of social impacts actually occurring. This translation of the scorecard results into a company risk score that constitutes the characterisation of the developed social LCA methodology. The translation from performance score to risk involves assessment of the context of the company in terms of geographical location and industry and of the typical level of social impacts that these entail, and interpretation of the company’s management effort in the light of this context.
Discussion
The developed indicators in social LCA are discussed in terms of their ability to reflect impacts within the four obligatory impact categories representing the labour rights according to the conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) covering forced labour, discrimination, restrictions of freedom of association and collective bargaining, and child labour. Also their feasibility and the availability of the required data are discussed.
Conclusions
It is concluded that it is feasible to develop indicators and characterisation methods addressing impacts related to the four obligatory impact categories representing the labour rights. The developed indicators are judged to be both feasible and relevant, but this remains to be further investigated in a separate paper in which they are implemented and tested in six separate industrial case studies.
Recommendations and perspectives
The suitability of multi-criteria assessment methods to cover other social impacts than the obligatory ILO-based impacts is discussed, and it is argued that the combination of indirect indicators measuring a risk of impacts and direct indicators giving a direct measure of the impacts requires an explicit weighting before interpretation and possible aggregation.
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Notes
This type of indicator is used for assessment in LCA by Barthel et al. (2005) for modelling of labour rights issues by indicators concerning the humanity of working conditions measured, e.g. in ‘seconds of actual child labour or forced labour’ (Barthel et al. 2005). This measurement requires information about number of child labourers and persons working involuntarily.
This example was also presented in a feasibility study about integration of social aspects into LCA (Griesshammer et al. 2006), where the authors briefly reflect on the complexity behind social indicators and the need of clear definitions.
Product relation factors is the same as what is referred to as share factors in Dreyer et al. (2005).
In the process of scoring company performance, some personal judgement may be necessary to determine management efforts and the degree of implementation, and therefore the scoring step may include elements of assessment.
Disability adjusted life years (DALY) is a metric developed by Murray and Lopez (1996) for the WHO and the World Bank. The original purpose was to have a tool to analyse the rationale of health budgets. DALY aggregates mortality and morbidity using weighting factors for the latter in the assessment of damage. Modelling of damage in life cycle impact assessment was introduced by Hofstetter (1998) and applied to the impact category Human Health in the Eco-indicator methodology (Goedkoop and Spriensma 2000). The QALY metric, which is the inverse of the DALY metric, has later been suggested applied in social LCA by Weidema (2006).
This is also reflected in the relative importance of the CAF, which in the extreme can move a company no more than two risk classes (see Table 3).
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Acknowledgements
The work has been performed as part of the Industrial PhD ‘Inclusion of Social Aspects in LCA’ carried out at Brødrene Hartmann A/S, Denmark, and Department of Management Engineering, Section for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, at the Technical University of Denmark. Financial support for the study from Brødrene Hartmann A/S and the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is gratefully acknowledged.
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Preamble: The present paper is the first in a series of two. The paper presents a characterisation model based on multi-criteria indicators representing fundamental labour rights, which is implemented in six company case studies and evaluated on this basis in the second paper (Part 2: Implementation in six company case studies).
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Dreyer, L.C., Hauschild, M.Z. & Schierbeck, J. Characterisation of social impacts in LCA. Int J Life Cycle Assess 15, 247–259 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-009-0148-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-009-0148-7