Social Life Cycle Assessment: a literature overview and an application in the textile sector

Companies are more and more interested in the sustainability character of products, services and processes and, for this reason, appropriate and suitable assessment tools supporting the transition to a green economy are highly necessary. Currently, there are a number of methods and approaches for assessing products’ economic, environmental and social impact and for improving their sustainability performances; among these, the Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) approach emerged as the most useful and effective to reach sustainability goals. Indeed, LCT aims to reduce a product’s resource use and emissions to the environment as well as to improve its socio-economic performance through its whole life cycle. LCT is made operational through Life Cycle Management (LCM) that is a management approach that puts the tools and methods of the LCT basket into practice. Many different tools are basic elements of LCM, but Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) are undoubtedly the most appreciated to assist product-related decision-making activities, from the extraction and processing of raw materials, manufacturing, distribution, use, reuse, maintenance, recycling and final disposal. LCA is already an internationally standardized tool (ISO 14040:2006 and ISO 14044:2006), on the contrary LCC and S-LCA still lack of international standardization (even if guidelines and general frameworks are available) and, especially S-LCA is still in the experimental stages for many aspects of its methodological structure. Considering that the S-LCA is still in its infancy, an analysis of this assessment tool is a useful starting point for a detailed description of the current situation and of the degree of advancement of the general theory on the subject and, in particular, on the various approaches and tools applied. Indeed, in recent years several different methods towards S-LCA have been developed. In this thesis a literature overview of S-LCA is presented. The overview has been carried out using two level of analysis: a bibliometric analysis in order to highlight the role and impact of S-LCA studies within the scholarly communities and, a critical analysis in order to show methodological differences and needs for future development of S-LCA. Finally, the findings of the literature review will be the key elements from which starting an applicative analysis. In particular, considering that S-LCA makes use of generic and site-specific quantitative, semi-quantitative and qualitative data, and that it complements the environmental LCA and LCC, the S-LCA method (extended with LCA analysis) will be applied to selected a product of a textile factory, “San Lorenzo Group”, located in San Marco D’Alunzio (Messina), in order to point verify its applicability and the potentiality to integrate its results into the company decision-making process.