Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA)

Companies start to include Corporate Social Responsibility into their corporate culture [MCCL10]. Traditionally, lower need levels of people were regarded, such as food, health and safety, but in the future the social aspects will likely be extended to higher levels such as worker satisfaction, self-esteem, etc. [HUTC10]. Societal aspects of product or process assessment include furthermore customer require­ments, legislation, cooperative strategies, market trends, technological develop­ment, and consumers’ behavior [UMED12].

Social Life Cycle Assessments are still in development [HAUS08]. Hauschild et al. suggests to add “human dignity and well-being” as fifth Area of Protection (AoP), including having a good and decent life enjoying respect and social mem­bership and with fulfilment of the basic needs for food, water, medical care [HAUS08, WEID06, DREY06]. The Committee on Sustainable Development of the United Nations has a large set of indicators with a strong focus on social sustainability and countries [UN07]. Social indicators include poverty, governance, health, education [UN07]. Hutchins et al. [HUTC10] propose a social sustainability indicator framework, which maps the needs to the different entities involved into the manufacturing system (Fig. 7.2).