Social Aspects

Sustainability is an increasingly used expression and many products are marketed as being sustainable. What does it mean? As one can see in the figure, a sustainable approach includes economical, ecological and social aspects.

In today’s practice, especially the social aspects are largely neglected, although some approaches for their inclusion, e.g. in LCA-models (Life Cycle Assessment), have been proposed. The challenge is to provide social information for processes, which will be aggregated along the supply chain and maintained in databases. These are requirements for an integrated assessment of ecological and social aspects in life cycle analyses. The department of Life Cycle Engineering at the University of Stuttgart developed the Life Cycle Working Environment (LCWE) method to solve this problem. Data about working conditions is integrated in LCA on the process stage. The method covers the following aspects:

• Amount and qualification level of work
• Health and safety data
• Data related to adoption of ILO-Humanity-Conventions.

The data quality is argued to be much better than input/output-matrix based data since it integrates statistical level data with unit process level data. Compliance with a pre-defined set of criteria assures world-wide applicability, comparability and consequent harmonization with LCA methodology and practice. The database is continuously built up and integrated into the GaBi Software.