Social Life Cycle Analysis: An Overview of the Literature to Compare and Complement Current Methodologies

Abstract

Even more studies on life cycle analysis highlight the environmental, economic, and social impact of supply chains, making evident to society realities that were unknown so far. Most academic and professional works are focused on developing indicators and standards to measure the environmental and economic impact of goods and services, whereas there are low contributions that improve tools to capture their social effects. The main difficulty in developing and applying social life cycle analysis (S-LCA) is due to the presence of high components of subjectivity and context specificity. The objective of this study is to offer a systematic literature review on S-LCA to understand in depth the existing applied methodologies. From the review, this paper identifies some aspects that the current methodologies are not considering and proposes as a result to complement such methodologies with other relevant perspectives.