Support Phosphorus Recycling Policy with Social Life Cycle Assessment: A Case of Japan

Abstract

Producing phosphorus (P) fertilizers with recycled P is desirable for efficient use of P resource. However, the current cost of P recycling facilities in Japan strongly discourages the government from adopting this practice. To expand consideration for a P recycling policy, the concept of social externality was introduced. Social issues, such as the violation of human rights in P mining in the Western Sahara, have been identified in recent studies; nevertheless, a systematic approach towards accountability was lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to support a P recycling policy with a social life cycle assessment (SLCA) by contrasting the social impacts associated with mineral and recycled P fertilizers using the case study of Japan. We developed a framework based on the UNEP-SETAC SLCA Guidelines with a supplementary set of P-specific social indicators. The results showed that the marginal social impact associated with recycled P was much less relative to mineral P; however, even if we factored in the maximum recycling capacity, a mandate of P recycling policy in Japan would not mitigate the impacts significantly relative to the current situation because only 15% of P rocks could be substituted. In short, we showed that a semi-quantitative SLCA framework would be useful to communicate the wide spectrum of social impacts to policymakers.

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

“…Their result is named "guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products" and was published in 2009, to give practical guidance on how to conduct S-LCA through key concepts and a structure similar to E-LCA [12,34]. Still, UNEP/SETAC did not propose a method for the actual Social Life Cycle Impact Assessment (S-LCIA) phase, which is why the testing of the Guidelines, the development of social databases and the development of impact assessment methods was recommended [34,51]. In addition, the first criticism regarding the use of E-LCA structures emerged in 2006 with the criticism about defining functional units (FU) for S-LCA [19].…”

Social Life-Cycle Assessment: A Review by Bibliometric Analysis

“…The sectors include primarily agriculture (tomatoes, sugarcane, raspberries, citrus growing, bananas, etc.) [45][46][47], food products (honey, eggs, milk) [48,49], forestry, chemical industry (chemicals, phosphorus fertilizers, terephthalate pet bottles, polyethylene) [50,51], bioenergy (bioenergy, biofuel, biomass, bioethanol, palm oil) [26,52,53], building and construction (building materials, concrete, buildings, retrofitting, steel industry, etc.) [54][55][56], transport and automobiles (electric vehicles, airbag, sustainable transport, etc.)…”

Capability of social life cycle assessment for analyzing the artisanal small-scale gold mining sector—case study in the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil

“…In general, the SLCA methodology has room for improvement, e.g., due to the lack of a standardized method, the handling of the functional units, and the indicator selection process (Iofrida 2016; Siebert et al 2016). In recent years, many case studies have been executed to test and further develop the method (Du et al 2019;Teah and Onuki 2017;Zamani 2016). In the present paper, the key issues of the ASGM sector in Brazil are derived and tested according to the capability of the SLCA methodology.…”

“…SCLA follows the same scheme as LCA but aims at estimating the positive and negative social and socioeconomic aspects along the life cycle of a product or service (Benoît and Mazijn 2009). The SLCA method is still in the development stage and has not reached maturity (Teah and Onuki 2017;Petti et al 2018). Questions have been raised such as: What exactly does the method reveal?…”