Social LCA—a way ahead?

Abstract

Roughly since 2004, there has been an ever increasing interest in developing and using social life cycle assessment (SLCA). A quick overview of the SLCA publications indexed by SCOPUS shows a small but stable increase from 2004 (Fig. 1). With regard to scientific publications, the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment has been the leading journal covering this field with around 85 % of the above publications, to a large extent probably due to the very early explicit interest from the journal and the announcement of a dedicated subject editor, David Hunkeler, whose role was later taken over by Tom Swarr. Thanks to these persons, the authors who have contributed and the timely interest from the journal, it seems that a new field of research has been established which is growing year by year—a development I will do my best to sustain during my time as subject editor on the SLCA area on the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. Despite this activity, it seems fair to state, as it has been so many times before, that SLCA is still in its infancy. But the ‘infant’ is now close to a decade, so how come it has not matured more? My claim is that SLCAwill continue to be considered in its infancy until it has more profoundly ‘proven to work’. But what does it mean that the SLCAworks? I would guess that for many a solid ‘proof’ would depend on at least two aspects: First of all that the methodology actually does ‘what it is supposed to do’ and secondly, that what SLCA does has to be unique or at least that the SLCA has to ‘do what it is supposed to do’ better than other comparable tools. If SLCA does not do what it is supposed to do, then at least the motivation for developing it needs to be reconsidered, and if what SLCA does is not unique in some way, there seems to be little point in developing a new tool for doing the same as some other tool is already doing. But what is SLCA supposed to do? From a first glance, it seems that SLCA is to deliver decision support relating to the social impacts of products (or services, systems or technologies—here termed products), to be used either for comparing products or identifying hotspots (Benoit and Mazijn 2009). In this regard, it may seem that SLCA already delivers. For example, case studies have already been conducted relating to, e.g. cut roses (Franze and Ciroth 2011), tomatoes (Evans et al. 2009) or laptop computers (Ekener-Petersen and Finnveden 2012). These studies do, indeed, provide an assessment of social impact of products which could be used for decision support. The question is, however, what decisions the decision support provided through SLCA is to support? The only obvious answer seems to be decisions leading to more beneficial social conditions throughout the product life cycles. If the use of SLCA in decision making does not lead to an improvement of these social impacts, then it seems as a rather pointless affair to develop, carry out and consider the SLCA result in a decision context. Thus, SLCA is to deliver decision support which improves the social impacts in the product life cycles when considered in a decision context. However, this idea of developing decision support in improving social conditions is far from new. Take, for Int J Life Cycle Assess (2013) 18:296–299 DOI 10.1007/s11367-012-0517-5