Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is defined as “the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development, working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their quality of life” (Holme & Watts 2000, p. 10). Among the key issues covered by this concept are human rights, employee rights, community involvement and supplier relations. It also covers an open information policy, including issues as disclosure, transparency, consumer education and anti- corruption measures. Depending on how much emphasis is placed on supplier and consumer relations, the concept of CSR comes close to that of Ethical Trade, which can also extend throughout the value chain. Ethical trade is defined as “the array of different initiatives that seek to add social and environmental as well as financial value added through trade” (Burns & Blowfield 1999) or as a trade in which “the behaviour of the traders is regulated by a value system on which consensus has been reached through an open and rational dialogue involving all parties that are affected by the trade” (Pedersen 1991). When these concepts are extended to the entire value chain, the relationship to Life Cycle Management (Weidema 2001) becomes obvious.
The coal-based power generation industry faces increased pressure to improve its environmental performance in the light of concerns over greenhouse gas emissions, water availability and releases of both acid gases and metals to air and water. Assessment of its environmental performance requires a methodology whereby all environmental impacts can be assessed accurately in full cognisance of their spatial and temporal dimensions, while taking into account the social acceptability of technologies employed. In this work, a methodology is developed to determine the environmental impact associated with solid wastes generated by this industry, and the application of this to the specific case of ash management is demonstrated. This methodology involves a consideration of leachate generation processes from ash impoundments, and subsequent mobility of leached components into groundwater, with due attention given to an analysis of pertinent physico-chemical phenomena. This analysis results in the identification of a time-dependent concentration profile of mobile constituents at the interface between the ash impoundment and the surrounding environment. The integration of leachate prediction modelling with plume dispersion modelling tools provides a measure of the extent to which a land mass is affected by any subsequent leachate migration. In this way it is possible to obtain a time dependent footprint of affected land which could be used as a semi-site specific indicator of the environmental impact of solid waste management practices.
Increasing residential insulation can decrease energy consumption and provide public health benefits, given changes in emissions from fuel combustion, but also has cost implications and ancillary risks and benefits. Risk assessment or life cycle assessment can be used to calculate the net impacts and determine whether more stringent energy codes or other conservation policies would be warranted, but few analyses have combined the critical elements of both methodologies. In this article, we present the first portion of a combined analysis, with the goal of estimating the net public health impacts of increasing residential insulation for new housing from current practice to the latest International Energy Conservation Code (IECC 2000). We model state-by-state residential energy savings and evaluate particulate matter less than 2.5 μm in diameter (PM2.5, NOx, and SO2 emission reductions. We use past dispersion modeling results to estimate reductions in exposure, and we apply concentration-response functions for premature mortality and selected morbidity outcomes using current epidemiological knowledge of effects of PM2.5 (primary and secondary). We find that an insulation policy shift would save 3 × 1014 British thermal units or BTU (3 × 1017 J) over a 10-year period, resulting in reduced emissions of 1,000 tons of PM2.5, 30,000 tons of NOx, and 40,000 tons of SO2. These emission reductions yield an estimated 60 fewer fatalities during this period, with the geographic distribution of health benefits differing from the distribution of energy savings because of differences in energy sources, population patterns, and meteorology. We discuss the methodology to be used to integrate life cycle calculations, which can ultimately yield estimates that can be compared with costs to determine the influence of external costs on benefit-cost calculations.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the flagship analytical tool in the Industrial Ecology “toolbox”, with a history of 30 years of practical application in both industry and government, and a global and growing body of practitioners in industry and academia.
LCA points to opportunities for:
The LCA approach’s initiation and development has been steered by the goal of avoiding “burden-shifting” from one environmental problem to another, or from one life cycle stage to another. Even with LCA’s challenging breadth, LCA-based inquiries can miss burden shifting within the realm of sustainable development, and can also miss opportunities for greater progress on sustainable development goals. The first required expansion is to include outcomes of an economic and social nature in addition to the current environmentally-related “Areas of Protection” which are used in LCA. The second required expansion relates to the framing of the question itself: Rather than take product-based delivery of a function as the pivot point of the analysis, we propose to quantitatively examine alternative ways that decisions alter the levels of satisfaction of fundamental and rather universal human needs for target shares of populations within societies.
In this paper we summarize the need for such an expanded framework, which we term Life Cycle Sustainable Development (LCSD). Next, we explore the feasibility of establishing an expanded set of “Areas of Protection” which address the scope of sustainable development; we suggest that one solution to this challenge may lie in recently proposed frameworks of core economic needs. Then we articulate the concept of need-required income (NRI) and summarize the results of recent analyses of NRI and its evolution over time. Finally, we propose an analytical approach for LCSD: main data sources and modeling methods which, in combination, can provide a capability for identifying and evaluating choices, from the level of individual to society, in terms of their consequences for levels of core human need satisfaction in the present and future.
In the first part of this paper, we developed a methodology to incorporate exposure and risk concepts into life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). We argued that both risk assessment and LCIA are needed to consider the impacts of increasing insulation for single-family homes in the US from current practice to the levels recommended by the 2000 International Energy Conservation Codes. In this analysis, we apply our model to the insulation case study and evaluate the benefits and costs of increased insulation for new housing.
The central estimate of impacts from the complete insulation manufacturing supply chain is approximately 14 premature deaths, 400 asthma attacks, and 7000 restricted activity days nationwide for one year of increased fiberglass output. Of the health impacts associated with increased insulation manufacturing, 83% is attributable to the supply chain emissions from the mineral wool industry, which is mostly associated with the direct primary PM2.5 emissions from the industry (98%). Reduced energy consumption leads to 1.2 premature deaths, 33 asthma attacks, and 600 restricted activity days avoided per year, indicating a public health payback period on the order of 11 years. Over 90% of these benefits were associated with direct emissions from power plants and residential combustion sources. In total, the net present value of economic benefits over a 50-year period for a single-year cohort of new homes is $190 million with a 5% discount rate, with 49 fewer premature deaths in this period.
Recommendation and Outlook. We have developed and applied a risk-based model to quantify the public health costs and benefits of increased insulation in new single-family homes in the US, demonstrating positive net economic and public health benefits within the lifetimes of the homes. More broadly, we demonstrated that it is feasible to incorporate exposure and risk concepts into I-O LCA, relying on regression-based intake fractions followed by more refined dispersion modeling. The refinement step is recommended especially if primary PM2.5 is an important source of exposure and if stack heights are relatively low. Where secondary PM2.5 is more important, use of regression-based intake fractions would be sufficient for a reasonable risk approximation. Uncertainties in our risk-based model should be carefully considered; nevertheless, our study can help decision-makers evaluate the costs and benefits of demand-side management policy options from a combined public health and life cycle perspective.
Incorporation of exposure and risk concepts into life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is often impaired by the number of sources and the complexity of site-specific impact assessment, especially when input-output (I-O) analysis is used to evaluate upstream processes. This makes it difficult to interpret LCIA outputs, especially in policy contexts. In this study, we develop an LCIA tool which takes into account the geographical variability in both emissions and exposure and which can be applied to all economic sectors in I-O analysis, relying on screening-level risk calculations and methods to estimate population exposure per unit emissions from specific geographic locations.
We develop our analytical approach with reference to the case of increasing insulation for new single-family homes in the US. We quantify the public health costs from increasing insulation manufacturing and compare them with the benefits from energy savings, focusing on mortality and morbidity associated with exposure to primary and secondary fine particles (PM2.5) as well as cancer risk associated with exposure to toxic air pollutants. We use OpenLC to estimate the incremental economic outputs induced by increased insulation and reduced fuel consumption and calculate emissions from a sector-specific pollution intensity matrix. We calculate sector-specific intake fractions (dimensionless ratios between the amount of pollutant intake and the amount of a pollutant emitted) using previously-derived regression models and apply these values to the supply chain emissions of fiberglass and fuel sources. We refine the exposure estimates for selected emission sites and pollutants that contribute significantly to total health impacts, running site-specific air dispersion models. We estimate health impacts using concentration-response functions from the published literature and compare the costs and benefits of the program by assigning monetary values to the health risks. In the second part of this paper, we present the results of our case study and consider the implications for incorporating exposure and risk concepts into I-O LCA.
In their contribution to a framework for social LCA, Dreyer et al. (2005) dismiss the possibility of using generic data for social LCA: "the value of conducting Social LCA on the basis of generic product chains is normally limited." which leads the authors to suggest that the system boundaries for social LCA should depend on the data-availability: "The need for company specific information and data has consequences for the scoping of the product system in Social LCA, i.e. which parts of the product system need to be included. In order to obtain specific information from a company, it is crucial that the data collector has some influence to exert on it."
Making the system boundary dependent on data availability leads to arbitrariness in system boundary setting, compromising the result for use in comparisons.
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The feasibility study was prepared in a multi-stage discussion process within the context of the Task Force "Integration of social aspects into LCA" of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. The methodology of environmental or biophysical LCA was taken and checked, whether and how social aspects can be integrated or supplemented to conduct a Social LCA (SCLA). Furthermore core elements and requirements upon the integration of social aspects are formulated.
In terms of methodology, there are evidently no fundamental problems calling the feasibility of SLCA into question. There are however certainly considerable hurdles to be overcome in practice, especially in characterisation modelling, because social impacts will require an entirely different type of modelling. Hurdles arise in the goal and scope definition (for example system boundaries and allocation/cut off criteria), in the categorization of indicator groups, in the classification of the associated individual indicators and in their characterization. It is quite probable that the very different appraisals of social aspects by different actors and in different countries, in combination with the process of interdisciplinary scientific discourse, will delay agreement for a longer time.
To promote the development and practical use of Social LCA the next important steps are to conduct more case studies, to establish a generally accepted list of well defined social indicators, to establish databases and to collect modules for the upstream chains and to compose an (extended) "code of practice" for Social LCA.
Social impacts in supply chains and product life cycles are of increasing interest to policy makers and stakeholders. Work is underway to develop social impact indicators for LCA, and to identify the social inventory data that will drive impact assessment for this category. Standard LCA practice collects and aggregates inventory data of the form units of input or output (elementary flow) per unit of process output. Measurement of social impacts within workplaces as well as host communities and societies poses new challenges not heretofore faced by LCA database developers. Participatory measurement and auditing of social impacts and of workplace health issues has been shown to provide important benefits relative to external auditor-based methods, including greater likelihood of detecting rights abuses, and stronger support of subsequent action for improvement. However, nonstandardized auditing and metrics poses challenges for the supply chain-wide aggregation and comparison functions of LCA. An analogous challenge arises in the case of resource extractive processes, for which the certification of best management practices provides an important and practical environmental metric. In both the social and resource extraction examples, it may be that attributes of the process are more valuable metrics to measure and incentivize than measured quantities per unit of process output. But how to measure, how to aggregate across life cycles, how to compare product life cycles, and how to incentivize progress as with product policy?
A methodology is presented and demonstrated which estimates the health impacts of economic development stemming from product life cycles. This methodology does not introduce new social indicators; rather, it works with the already common LCA endpoint of human health, and introduces and applies a simplified empirical relationship to characterize the complex pathways from product life cycles' economic activity to health in the aggregate.
A simple case study indicates that the health benefits of economic development impacts in product life cycles have the potential to be very significant, possibly even orders of magnitude greater than the health damages from the increased pollution. While the simple macro model points up the dramatic importance of socio-economic pathways to health in product life cycles, it lacks any sensitivity to the vitally important, contextspecific attributes of the economic development associated with each process. This result begs the question of how to measure, aggregate, compare, and stimulate society-wide improvement of context-dependent attributes within and across product life cycles in LCA.
Before attempting an answer to the question noted above, a brief reconsideration is offered concerning life cycle assessment. Namely, where does it come from, and what does it bring?
Finally, the paper concludes by sketching a life cycle approach to promoting localized assessments, to summarizing their results over supply chains and life cycles, and to comparing product life cycles in terms of their results. Often, localized assessments will yield information on the attributes of a process, rather than (or in addition to) the traditional form of life cycle inventory information, which is units of something per unit of process output. The methodology can enable product policy users to promote reporting of basic attributes of processes within supply chains, together with local measurement and reporting of context-relevant impacts. For attributes linked to progress on impacts of local and global concern, promotion of these attributes within supply chain processes will bring strong benefits. In addition, over time it may be possible for researchers to develop and refine models that estimate, based on cross-sectional and time series analysis of attributes and impacts, relationships between attributes and impacts. In any case, while local impacts across supply chains may not be precisely knowable – let alone controllable – by a microdecision maker at the time of their product-related decision, life cycle attribute analysis may give such decision makers an opportunity to empower progress throughout life cycles and supply chains, which is after all a motivating goal of LCA.
