Review of methodologies for Social LCA

During the last years the interest for including social impacts in LCA has grown steadily, resulting in several preliminary Social LCA (SLCA) methodology proposals. A review of 12 methodological proposals has been made covering the most of what has been proposed as Social LCA until now focusing on their approaches to the goal and scope definition, inventory, and impact assessment phases of LCA. The review concludes that a main methodical difference lies in the definition of impact categories to be included in the assessment as well as in the formulation of indicators. Another challenging aspect is the data collection. Some SLCA proposals opinion that the use of generic process data is not feasible in SLCA, because social impacts are claimed not to be process specific but rather company specific. This change could easily imply a strong need for site-specific data leading to a very demanding data collection process. The review shows that the field of SLCA is still being framed, and that there is presently limited consensus on the approaches and that a fully developed method to support a full SLCA applying calculation procedures as known from LCA is not yet available.