Including social impacts in LCIA

Sustainability management in industries is often defined by measuring the performance against the triple bottom-line, People, Planet and Profit in business decisions. The product chain perspective inherent in LCA is very suitable for sustainability management but LCA methodology only considers environmental impacts and, therefore, recommendations based on LCA fail to address both social and economic concerns. This has raised questions about LCA's ability to support sustainable development decisions. In a research project carried out at Brødrene Hartmann A/S and the Technical University of Denmark a framework for social LCA is currently being developed. The project quantifies social impacts and makes them operational in the traditional LCIA framework by developing measurable indicators. These indicators are selected to provide a meaningful and sufficient overall description of social impacts of all activities in the product life cycle. Workers’ fundamental rights, as defined by the ILO, are used as baseline in the method, and as a consequence, some of the issues addressed by the method are: child labour, discrimination, right to organise, and forced labour.