Impact Pathways to Address Social Well-Being and Social Justice in SLCA—Fair Wage and Level of Education

Sustainability

Sabrina Neugebauer¹  Marzia Traverso²  René Scheumann¹  Ya-Ju Chang¹  Kirana Wolf¹ 

[1] Department of Environmental Technology, Chair of Sustainable Engineering, Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin, Germany; E-Mails:;Erzgießereistr. 16, 80335 München, Germany; E-Mail:

关键词: social life cycle assessment;    social well-being;    social justice;    fair wage;    education;    impact pathway;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su6084839

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Social well-being and social justice are meant to create a positive outcome meaningful for people and societies. According to the guidelines of social life cycle assessment, especially well-being should be considered as the main area of protection to assess social impacts of products. In addition, equity and equality need to be addressed in terms of social justice to ensure a fair and ethic society. However, even if a lot of studies focused on the definition social indicators to assess resulting impacts, neither have scientific or common agreements been founded to define a valid set of indicators, nor have consistent pathways from inventory towards impact indicators been established. This work, therefore, proposes possible pathways from life cycle inventory to impact assessment of two social midpoint categories: fair wage and level of education. Respective cause-effect-chains are developed based on the environmental life cycle assessment principle. Correspondingly, social inventory indicators throughout direct impacts to midpoint and endpoint categories are defined. Three endpoint categories are included (economic welfare, damage to human health and environmental stability) to address social well-being and social justice. Qualitative characterization factors and a scaling method are proposed to evaluate the impacts according to threshold and reference values from valuable literature.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.