A Practical Approach for Social Life Cycle Assessment in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

Identifying social impacts along the life cycle of their products is becoming increasingly important for companies. Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) as a possible tool has not been conducted so far within industries with complex international supply chains using mainly company-specific data. As a novelty, this work presents a practical SLCA approach along with the first case studies for the automotive industry, based on a previously developed indicator set and an extensive data collection. Social data was collected from companies along the life cycle of two specific car components, while analyzing data availability, validity and comparability. To obtain product references, both a top-down and a bottom-up approach for quantitative indicators based on time effort and data availability on the process level were devised. Also, two options were developed for how qualitative indicators (e.g., written principles for Corruption) can be applied together with quantitative performance indicators (e.g., number of accidents). The general practical applicability of the approach could be demonstrated by four quantitative and seven qualitative indicators. It is a first step towards analyzing the social performance of products with complex supply chains on a company level. Remaining challenges/limitations include social data availability and quality and obtaining data at the process level (allocation) and should be addressed in future studies.

Social Life Cycle Assessments: A Review on Past Development, Advances and Methodological Challenges

“…This was accompanied and influenced by the release of the UNEP/SETAC methodological sheets for subcategories in 2013 and the Handbook for Product Social Impact Assessments (PSIA) in 2014 [13,14]. PSIA was the result of a joint corporate effort by the Roundtable for Product Social Metrics, proposing a method from companies for companies, to assess social impacts of products from a life cycle perspective [24,68]. It included the first consideration of positive social impacts and was last updated in 2020 [24,69].…”

“…Understanding the differences in S-LCA procedures and interpreting the results requires highly specialized knowledge about the procedures, the sector and the case under study. Additionally, the general comparison of social performances is challenging, as Karlewski et al [68] exemplify with questions such as: how to evaluate a company that has a high turnover and does not assign importance to diversity, in comparison to a company with little turnover but a high proportion of disabled workers? What is a good or bad performance in this case and why?…”

Assessing Early‐Stage CO2 utilization Technologies—Comparing Apples and Oranges?

“…[33] Literature covering techno-economic assessments in general include evaluation by ar ange of technologic and economic indicators;h owever, no general procedures or methods seem to have emergeds of ar. [34,35] Environmental impacta ssessment in contrast is am uch more mature area of assessment. As earch for the topic "environmental assessment" provides results of over 4200 publications listed by the endo f2 015 within the literature database Webo fS cience Core Collection-about twentyf our times more than for techno-economic assessment.…”

“…Thef ocus of S-LCA is placed on behavior of companies. [34] In this way,S -LCA finds limited application for early-stage technologies where companiesd on ot yet exist or have recently evolved.…”

Introducing a product sustainability budget at an automotive company—one option to increase the use of LCSA results in decision-making processes

“…Furthermore, there are singular efforts to address other sustainability dimensions at other OEMs. Research has been carried out at Volkswagen on LCC [14] and a dissertation on S-LCA at Daimler [86].…”