Annekatrin Lehmann

Social aspects for sustainability assessment of technologies—challenges for social life cycle assessment (SLCA)

PurposeTechnologies can contribute to sustainable development (e.g., improving living conditions) and at the same time cause sustainability problems (e.g., emissions). Decisions on alternative technologies should thus ideally be based on the principle to minimize the latter. Analyzing environmental, economic, and social aspects related to technologies supports decisions by identifying the “more sustainable” technology. This paper focuses on social issues. First, it discusses the applicability of the social life cycle assessment (SLCA) guidelines for a comparative technology analysis, taking the example of two case studies in developing countries. Indicating technologies as “sustainable” also means that they are indeed operated over the expected lifetime, which, in development projects, is often not guaranteed. Consequently, social aspects related to implementation conditions should be considered in an SLCA study as well. Thus, a second focus is laid on identifying appropriate indicators to address these aspects.MethodsFirst, the SLCA guidelines were examined with regard to applying this product-related approach to two real case studies (analysis of technologies/plants for water supply and for decentralized fuel production) for a comparative technology analysis. Suitable indicators are proposed. To address the second focus, a literature research on technology assessment and implementation in developing countries was conducted. Moreover, socioeconomic studies in the investigation areas of the case studies were consulted. Based on this, indicators addressing implementation conditions were identified from the SLCA guidelines and additional literature.Results and discussionThe study shows social issues and indicators found in the SLCA guidelines and considered suitable for a comparative technology analysis in the case studies. However, for a sustainability assessment of technologies, especially in developing countries, further indicators are required to address technology implementation conditions. A set of additional social indicators like reported trust in institutions or fluctuation of personnel is proposed. Though these indicators were derived based on specific case studies, they can also be suggested to other technologies and are not necessarily limited to developing countries.ConclusionsThe study pointed out that an application of the SLCA guidelines considering the whole life cycle was not (yet) feasible for the case studies considered. This is mainly due to the lack of data. Regarding technology implementation, it was examined which indicators are available in this SLCA approach and which could additionally be integrated and applied. This is relevant as a potential contribution of technologies to sustainable development can only be achieved when the technologies are successfully implemented.

Challenges in Life Cycle Assessment: An Overview of Current Gaps and Research Needs

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of current gaps of and challenges for LCA structured into inventory, impact assessment, generic and evolving aspects. A total of 34 gaps and challenges were identified. These include challenges like ‘allocation’, ‘uncertainty’ or ‘biodiversity’, as well as issues like ‘littering’, ‘animal well-being’ or ‘positive impacts’ which are not covered as often in the existing LCA literature. Each of these gaps is described by a high-level overview of the topic and its relevance to LCA, and the state of the art in terms of literature and potential solutions, if any, is presented.

Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Approaches for Manufacturing

Sustainability assessments considering the three dimensions environment, economy, and society are needed to evaluate manufacturing processes and products with regard to their sustainability performance. This chapter focuses on Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA), which considers all three sustainability dimensions by combining the three methods Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA). Existing LCSA approaches as well as selected ongoing work are introduced, both regarding the individual approaches as well as the combined LCSA approach. This includes, for instance, the Tiered Approach. This approach facilitates the implementation of LCSA, for instance, within the manufacturing sector, by providing a category hierarchy and guiding practitioners through the various impact and cost categories proposed for the three methods. Furthermore, ongoing developments in LCC and SLCA are presented, such as the definition of first economic and social impact pathways (linking fair wage and level of education to social damage levels) for addressing the current challenges of missing impact pathways for economic and social aspects. In addition, the Sustainability Safeguard Star suggests a new scheme for addressing the inter-linkages between the three sustainability dimensions. These approaches foster the application and implementation of LCSA and thus contribute to developing sustainable processes and products.

Policy Options for Life Cycle Assessment Deployment in Legislation

Life cycle thinking is on the political agenda and widely used in practice. Moreover, numerous industries have actively been developing life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches for many years. As the authors think that it is in substance “right” to base environmental legislation on LCA, they started to explore and to develop policy options for integrating LCA into legislation. Commissioned by WorldAutoSteel, the authors focused on CO2 legislation in the automotive industry, but the options developed based on this example can be used for other industries and other environmental impacts as well. It was found that theoretically a broad range of policy options exists, and that practically some of them are already implemented in real world legislation and that there is no clear scientific overall preference for one single option. It was also shown that solutions for most technical requirements are already available, but that a consensus on proper setting of these requirements is missing.

Life Cycle Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry Using an Applicable and Robust LCA-Based Environmental Sustainability Assessment Approach

Despite growing concerns over the environmental impacts of pharmaceuticals, the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) within the pharma-sector remains quite fragmentary. The aim of this paper is to present gaps and challenges, impeding a full adoption of LCA in the pharma-sector. A review of existing pharma-LCAs revealed a considerable degree of inconsistency and inhomogeneity in their methodological choices, highlighting the need for product category rules (PCRs) for the pharmaceutical industry to harmonize and facilitate the future use of LCA in that sector. Additionally, existing life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods fail to model several pharma-specific impact pathways (e.g. endocrine disruption). Preliminary thoughts on the development of pharma-PCRs and the inclusion of pharma-specific impact pathways into LCIA are presented, providing important stimulus for further research.

Introducing weights to life cycle sustainability assessment—how do decision-makers weight sustainability dimensions?

PurposeDecisions based on life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) pose a multi-criteria decision issue, as impacts on the three different sustainability dimensions have to be considered which themselves are often measured through several indicators. To support decision-making at companies, a method to interpret multi-criteria assessment and emerging trade-offs would be beneficial. This research aims at enabling decision-making within LCSA by introducing weights to the sustainability dimensions.MethodsTo derive weights, 54 decision-makers of different functions at a German automotive company were asked via limit conjoint analysis how they ranked the economic, environmental, and social performance of a vehicle component. Results were evaluated for the entire sample and by functional clusters. Additionally, sustainability respondents, i.e., respondents that dealt with sustainability in their daily business, were contrasted with non-sustainability respondents. As a last step, the impact of outliers was determined. From this analysis, practical implications for ensuring company-optimal decision-making in regard to product sustainability were derived.Results and discussionThe results showed a large spread in weighting without clear clustering. On average, all sustainability dimensions were considered almost equally important: the economic dimension tallied at 33.5%, the environmental at 35.2%, and the social at 31.2%. Results were robust as adjusting for outliers changed weights on average by less than 10%. Results by function showed low consistency within clusters hinting that weighting was more of a personal than a functional issue. Sustainability respondents weighted the social before the environmental and economic dimension while non-sustainability respondents put the economic before the other two dimensions. Provided that the results of this research could be generalized, the retrieved weighting set was seen as a good way to introduce weights into an operationalized LCSA framework as it represented the quantification of the already existing decision process. Therefore, the acceptance of this weighting set within the respective company was expected to be increased.ConclusionsIt could be shown that conjoint analysis enabled decision-making within LCSA by introducing weights to solve a multi-criteria decision issue. Furthermore, implications for practitioners could be derived to ensure company-optimal decision-making related to product sustainability. Future research should look at expanding the sample size and geographical scope as well as investigating the weighting of indicators within sustainability dimensions and the drivers that influence personal decision-making in regard to weighting sustainability dimensions.

Application options of the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI) – assessing the status of sustainable development and establishing social impact pathways

The needs of children and their vulnerability to diseases, violence and poverty are different from those of adults. The Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI) was thus developed in previous work to evaluate the status of sustainable development for countries with a focus on children and triple-bottom-line thinking. This study proposes application options to put the SCDI into practice. The SCDI can be performed similarly to existing development indices, for comparing and tracing the performance of sustainable development on different geographic levels and between population groups. In addition, the SCDI can be integrated into existing social sustainability assessment approaches (e.g., Social Life Cycle Assessment and Social Organizational Life Cycle Assessment) and databases (e.g., The Social Hotspots Database) to take children into account and enhance impact assessment of social sustainability assessment approaches. As an exemplification, this study demonstrates the application of the SCDI framework to support the development of social impact pathways. Due to the importance of tertiary education in reducing poverty, a preliminary social impact pathway addressing completion of tertiary education was established. By putting the SCDI into practice, the SCDI can support decision making in child as well as sustainable development policies.

Modelling pharmaceutical emissions and their toxicity‐related impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA) – A review

Over the last few decades, worldwide detection of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in aquatic environments and the associated toxicological effects on wildlife and human health have become a matter of public and scientific debate. While life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) models are increasingly used to assess the potential eco- and human-toxicological effects of chemical emissions, few studies have looked into the issue of modeling pharmaceutical emissions specifically and their toxicity-related effects in an LCA context. This paper reviews the state of the art to inventory and characterize API emissions in LCA with the goal to identify relevant gaps and challenges. A search for 208 environmentally relevant APIs in 2 life cycle inventory (LCI) databases revealed a meager representation of this group of chemicals. Similarly, the LCIA model USEtox was found to include characterization factors (CFs) for less than 60 APIs. First approaches to model API emissions in LCA were identified on the basis of an examination of 40 LCA case studies in the pharmaceutical sector and in the field of wastewater treatment. Moreover, CFs for 79 additional APIs, expressing their ecotoxicity and/or human toxicity potential, were gathered from literature. An analysis of the variability of API-CFs in different LCIA models showed a variation of about 2-3 orders of magnitude. Based on the review results, 3 main gaps in the modeling and characterization of API emissions in an LCA context were identified: (1) incomplete modeling of API flows and API emissions along the life cycle of human pharmaceuticals, especially during their use and end-of-life phase, (2) limited API coverage in existing LCIA toxicity models, and (3) missing pharma-specific impact pathways (e.g., endocrine disruption and antibiotic resistance) in existing LCIA models. Recommendations to tackle these gaps are provided, and priority action steps are discussed. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2019;15:6-18.