Strengths or bias in social LCA?

Abstract

Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) emerged in the last years as a methodological approach aimed at evaluating social and socioeconomic aspects of products and their potential positive and negative impacts along their life cycle. According to the Guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products (Benoit and Mazijn 2009), developed within the UNEPS/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, social impacts are those that may affect stakeholders along the life cycle of a product and may be linked to company behaviour, socioeconomic processes and impacts on social capital. This definition includes two strengths of S-LCA that together distinguish it from other social assessment methods: (1) the focus on the product and (2) the broad definition of social impacts, which encompasses both the company behaviour and the socioeconomic perspective. From a company perspective, one of the main added values of S-LCA is the possibility to spend the results of the evaluation on the market. This could be achieved, for example by means of a social label, in a way similar to what is done for the carbon footprint. Based on the powerful potential of S-LCA, the authors would like to point out that the two strengths of the methodology might also represent a source of bias and risks, if not dealt with properly and responsibly. We would like to briefly work this concept out, giving hints for further reflection. Starting from the focus on the product, the functional unit (FU) comes into the discussion. This concept is at the core of LCA, but it shows critical aspects when applied in the context of social evaluations. Let us consider the case of a company producing product x and one supplier of theirs, producing a component of x as well as other products/components. The supplier might make use of child labour for manufacturing several products but not the component of x, for example because different production lines are involved (this issue has already been discussed by Jorgensen et al. 2009). If we apply the S-LCA to the assessment of product x by focusing on the product system itself, this deplorable behaviour could not be caught, because the supplier would carry responsibility only for that part of production included in the product system x. This would be a step back with respect to the corporate social responsibility, which pushes companies to mature a high sense of responsibility for and within the company as a whole. However, the S-LCA framework is strongly based on a company perspective, i.e. a perspective that links the socioeconomic impacts to the behaviour of a company. The importance of connecting the social impacts mainly to the conduct of a company and not to the function delivered by a given product is emphasised in the literature by several authors (see e.g. Dreyer et al. 2006). This is further confirmed by the many boycott campaigns initiated by consumer groups or other stakeholders when the social performance of a company was deemed to be inadequate or poor under different aspects. We may cite, for instance, the Nike boycott launched in the 1990s against the inhuman A. Zamagni (*) : P. Buttol LCA & Ecodesign Laboratory, Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), via Martiri di Monte Sole 4, 40129 Bologna, Italy e-mail: alessandra.zamagni@enea.it