Social Life Cycle Assessment: State of the art and challenges for supporting product policies

Well-being is considered one of the main development goals of modern society. Assessing what could improve well-being and what may undermine it is a key element in public policies, looking at social benefit and impacts. Cultural elements, different values and lifestyles affect the way social issues are perceived. Moreover, social impacts along supply chains are increasingly assessed by different stakeholders, such as government, business and NGO’s. Life cycle-based methodologies have been developed to assess environmental impacts along supply chains, from extraction of raw materials to end of life of products. Social life cycle assessment (SLCA) integrates traditional life cycle assessment by having social aspects as focus. In fact, sustainability assessment requires that environmental, social and economic impacts and benefit are taken into account. present report aims at presenting: i) the state of the art in Social Life Cycle Assessment, illustrating the main theoretical and methdological elements under discussion in scientific domain. ii) overlaps and synergies with traditional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) towards a common framework; iii) examples of application at macro scale (EU-28) and at sector scale (Metal sector) of a set of indicators.