Assessing social impacts in a life cycle perspective—Lessons learned

In our globalised economy, important stakeholder groups nowadays hold companies responsible for the social impacts they cause in their product chain through activities like child labour, corruption or discrimination of employees. Many companies thus see themselves in need of a tool which can help them make informed decisions about their social impacts throughout the life cycle of their products. The paper presents lessons learned from four years of work with industry on development of a methodology for Social Life Cycle Assessment and implementation in the industrial product chain. The Social LCA methodology supplements the traditional environment-oriented LCA and the life cycle costing tools in support of sustainability management addressing all three pillars of sustainability: people, planet and profit.