An integrated social life cycle assessment of freight transport systems

Osorio-Tejada, José Luis; Llera‐Sastresa, Eva; Scarpellini, Sabina; Hashim, Ahmad Hariza

doi:10.1007/s11367-019-01692-w

Cited by 10 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Additionally, organizational S-LCAs gained attention, because scientists agreed that most social impacts occur because of the general behavior of companies rather than physical flows in production processes [20,53]. Therefore, scientists including Dreyer et al [46] or Jørgensen et al [54] argued that the assessment should be performed through an organizational lens [55]. In addition, Dreyer et al [46] introduced the S-LCA scope reduction through the companies' sphere of influence [20].…”

Section: First Steps Towards S-lca (1990-2009)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Employment figures of the European Automotive Manufacturer Association (ACEA) display that 14.6 million direct and indirect jobs were provided by the automotive sector in 2018, which have an enormous impact on the social situation in Europe as it accounts for 6.7% of the total EU employment [77]. Additionally, the interrelatedness between the automotive industry and sub-sectors such as fuel producers or infrastructure constructors has great influence on sustainable decision-making beyond organizational boundaries of car manufacturers [55].…”

Section: S-lca and The Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, efforts such as educational campaigns, donations or management systems preventing harassment or corruption are mostly described linguistically without the use of structured and comparable measurement approaches, as is the case for environmental issues. Therefore, Osorio-Tejeda et al [55] warned that sustainability strategies implemented without an organized and multidisciplinary approach to evaluate environmental and social aspects could have negative impacts on sectors and sub-sectors. Mancini and Sala [76] further argued that engaging in S-LCA could enhance trust among societies and acceptability of sectors that produce and process raw materials, such as the automotive industry.…”

Section: S-lca and The Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Guidelines leave plenty of room for researchers to define individual cut-off criteria justifying the exclusion of processes or stakeholders, which often results in a great variety of approaches or missing explanations. Examples are the cut-off according to social significance, the cut-off because of empirical limitations such as missing data, the cutoff based on hot-spot or sensitivity analyses or the cut-off of identical elements or according to the companies' sphere of influence, which implies that the S-LCA includes only processes or stakeholders that can be influenced by the company under assessment [55,61].…”

Section: Goal and Scope Definition: Linking Lca Structures To Social Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, according to PSIA, an ideal performance is when a working week does not exceed legal limits or 48 h and overtime is voluntary and compensated at premium rate [14]. Since overtime is regulated by laws, Osorio-Tejeda et al [55] argue that this would expect the most positive performance to be compliance with laws. Consequently, the missing benchmark for positive impacts leaves room for interpretation and caused a very heterogeneous picture in the S-LCA literature [105].…”

Section: Inventory Analysis: Defining and Integrating Positive Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2021

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Society’s interest in social impacts of products, services and organizational behaviors is rapidly growing. While life cycle assessments to evaluate environmental stressors have generally been well established in many industries, approaches to evaluate social impacts such as Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) lack methodological consistency and standardization. The aim of this paper is to identify past developments and methodological barriers of S-LCA and to summarize how the automotive industry contributed to the advancement or application of this method. Therefore, a qualitative content analysis of 111 studies published between 2015 and 2020 is used to gather information on past scientific and political milestones, methodological barriers impeding S-LCA and the participation of the automotive sector. The review shows that a broad range of sectors such as the automotive industry contributed to the testing and advancement of S-LCA in the past but that S-LCA remains a young and immature method. Large-scale application is impeded by major barriers such as the variety of impact categories and sub-categories, the lacking integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), issues of linking LCA structures to social phenomena or the difficult tracking of social impact pathways. Further research on standardization possibilities, the connection to political social targets and the testing of methods is necessary to overcome current barriers and increase the applicability and interpretability results.

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Section: First Steps Towards S-lca (1990-2009)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: S-lca and The Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: S-lca and The Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Goal and Scope Definition: Linking Lca Structures To Social Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Inventory Analysis: Defining and Integrating Positive Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2021

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Environmental assessment of road freight transport services beyond the tank-to-wheels analysis based on LCA

Osorio-Tejada

Llera‐Sastresa

Scarpellini

2022

Environ Dev Sustain

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Reducing environmental impacts in transport motivates many studies to offer more sustainable freight services. However, most methodologies focus on impacts from fuel consumption, and approaches trying to integrate other transport components have not facilitated its application to actual and specific transport services. In this study, we present a harmonized approach to address the transport services with a holistic way to increase the knowledge about hotspots of the transport sector based on the life cycle assessment methodology. In this framework, vehicle manufacturing, fuel production, and infrastructure construction are the key transport components around the traffic process. Besides fuel usage, the operation and maintenance of vehicles and infrastructures are also included. We developed a tool to create the life cycle inventories for each transport component to be applied to specific transport services in any location with a comprehensive view and low uncertainty in the results. This approach was applied to road-freight services in Colombia, Malaysia, and Spain. The main results showed the nature and origin of the environmental impacts, which are highly influenced by the emissions control technologies, road characteristics, and traffic volume. The contribution of atmospheric pollutants per tonne-km can decrease by a quarter when Euro VI trucks on highways instead of conventional trucks on single-lane roads are used. However, these contributions are highly affected by fuel production due to the origin of biofuels. The proposed methodology provides relevant information to estimate transport impacts in the life cycle assessment of products with superior precision and identify strategies for systemically improving sustainability.

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Step-by-step social life cycle assessment framework: a participatory approach for the identification and prioritization of impact subcategories applied to mobility scenarios

Bouillass

Blanc

Pérez‐López

2021

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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Purpose Investigating potential social and socio-economic impacts should play a key role for the development of sustainable mobility alternatives. Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) is becoming increasingly important to ensure holistic sustainability assessments. The present work aims at identifying and evaluating social and socio-economic impact subcategories in S-LCA. A novel participatory approach implying all concerned stakeholders is proposed to select relevant impact subcategories and thus contribute to a thorough interpretation of S-LCA results. It is applied to assess electric and conventional vehicles. Methodology This paper describes a comprehensive step-by-step S-LCA framework. The innovation of this work consists in defining a structured S-LCA framework integrating a systematic approach based on two stages: (1) a sectorial risk analysis for the identification of impact subcategories and (2) a participatory approach for their prioritization. The proposed participatory approach considers all concerned stakeholders to enable the selection of the most relevant impact subcategories. A set of social inventory indicators is attributed to subcategories that were perceived as the most relevant. These are used to perform the social evaluation and carry out a full analysis in the result interpretation allowing thus to integrate a multi-actor perspective to the materiality assessment. Results The defined S-LCA framework is implemented to compare two mobility scenarios, corresponding to electric and conventional vehicle technologies. A new set of mobility-related impact subcategories is proposed for users’ stakeholder. Following the new designed participatory approach, subcategories for all stakeholders are prioritized according to different actors’ perceptions. For example, “safe and healthy living conditions,” “local employment,” and “delocalization and migration” were perceived for local communities as the most relevant subcategories by the different consulted stakeholders (industrial, academic, and public actors and users). These results also showed that social significance varies depending on the consulted actors and on the geographical area of the study. Using PSILCA database, we have investigated the subcategories that were perceived as the most relevant. Results for the evaluation and interpretation phases are presented for both transportation technologies. Conclusions This approach aims at increasing local relevance of S-LCA results and their representativeness. Results for the considered mobility scenarios have demonstrated the need to extend the scope of the materiality assessment, generally used for determining subcategories’ social significance from a single stakeholder perspective, by involving other stakeholders into the prioritization stage. Moreover, the proposed comprehensive S-LCA framework integrating the participatory approach is general enough to be applied to other product systems and sectors.

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An integrated social life cycle assessment of freight transport systems

Cited by 10 publications

References 34 publications

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

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

Environmental assessment of road freight transport services beyond the tank-to-wheels analysis based on LCA

Step-by-step social life cycle assessment framework: a participatory approach for the identification and prioritization of impact subcategories applied to mobility scenarios

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