The authors regret that an inconsistency was identified between the results presented in Fig. 6 and the inventory data reported in Tables S.11 and S.12 of the Supplementary Information. This discrepancy arose because an additional scenario from a previous version of the manuscript was inadvertently retained in the Supplementary Information, although it was not included in the final published article. As a result, the scenario numbering in the Supplementary Information did not correspond to the scenarios discussed in the main text, leading to apparent inconsistencies for Climate change and Marine ecotoxicity results for Scenario 3. The Supplementary Information has now been corrected by removing the tables related to the excluded scenario and aligning the remaining scenario numbering with the final version of the article. The results presented in the main article remain unchanged. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

The sustainable supply of water is crucial, especially on islands where water is scarce. Our study applied the social life cycle assessment (S-LCA), under the organizational approach, to assess industrial water production on the island of Lampedusa, Italy. A novel plant for industrial water production considering a circular concept was compared with the existing linear production plant based on reverse osmosis. An online survey, brief literature review and generic analysis were conducted to prioritize impact subcategories selection for site-specific analysis that regarded six organizations in the system boundaries. These subcategories were Local employment, Access to material resources, Promoting social responsibility, End-of-life responsibility, Health and safety (Workers), and Public commitment to sustainability issues. The social performance of organizations involved was assessed based on equal weighting and weighting with cost values. The generic analysis showed that wastewater treatment in Italy is underdeveloped, and water scarcity can become a serious problem in the future. The site-specific analysis based on equal weighting showed that the novel water plant results in improving social performance for all considered impact subcategories by 88 % to 91 % due to co-production when compared with the existing plant. Even increasing impacts allocation to industrial water production social benefits are still expected due to co-production. The type of weighting based on cost values showed that two organizations are the main contributors to the social performance of the novel system, and improving their corporate conduct can result in improving impacts up to 25 %, such as Public commitment to sustainability issues. To conclude, the novel plan does provide social benefits but mainly due to co-production, thus, it should be investigated more how to apply the S-LCA to linear production systems as they become more circular.