Development of a Social Life Cycle Assessment framework for manufacturing organizations

Abstract

Modern manufacturing organizations have started to adopt sustainable manufacturing strategies to enhance their competitiveness and to enrich their business practices at an enterprise level. This is achieved by creating a balance between the environmental, economic and societal dimensions of sustainability. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of the approaches of sustainable manufacturing that models complex interaction between the aforesaid dimensions of a product, from cradle to grave. LCA can be performed as Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (E - LCA) and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S -LCA) considering the need and contribution of stakeholders involved. In literature, various researchers have discussed about the Environmental LCA and their application pertaining to manufacturing organizations. A very few studies have focused on the Social LCA part and no concrete research has been reported on the development of a generic Social LCA framework for manufacturing organizations. This study presents the development of a generic framework for conducting Social LCA for manufacturing organizations. The developed framework is a two-level model consisting of first level stakeholders and second level subcategories. The model consists of three first level stakeholders and nine second level sub categories. Three impact categories namely Working Conditions (WC), Health and Safety (HS), Socio-economic repercussions (SE) were selected for this study. The framework was validated with a case study conducted at a manufacturing organization. The results of the assessment are discussed to obtain inference. The developed framework would be useful for manufacturing organizations for conducting Social LCA and to augment their societal dimension of sustainability