Developing and Applying a Social Life Cycle Assessment Methodology to Assess the Social Sustainability Performance of Organizations in the Dutch Chemical Process Industry

Abstract

Over the past few decades, sustainable development has become one of society's most important challenges. In an effort to become sustainable, many companies experience an increasing need to measure, manage and improve the negative economic, environmental and social impacts caused by their organizational behavior along corporate supply chains and product life cycles. Sustainability performance assessment methods are a means for business decision-makers to meet such needs. While sustainability performance assessment methods for economic and environmental dimensions are well-developed, the social dimension of sustainability is lacking in that regard. Social sustainability entails issues such as equity and human rights of company stakeholders such as employees, customers, local community members, value chain actors and society. There is an increasing concern to incorporate social sustainability by businesses so as to become sustainable in all three dimensions; however, an empirical tool is needed to for measuring the social impacts of the company operations and making improvements. The Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) tool was developed for the assessment of the social dimension of sustainability in a meaningful way for application in the business world. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Society for Environmental Toxicologists and Chemists (SETAC) developed S-LCA Guidelines and Methodological Sheets in 2009 and 2013, respectively, for assessing the social impacts of products and services across the life cycle. The UNEP/SETAC S-LCA methodological framework has been considered the “landmark in the field” of social sustainability assessment because it provides a view of the value chain, an aspect lacking in other social sustainability assessment tools. Even with recent increasing publications by S-LCA practitioners, however, S-LCA is still at an early stage of research and the UNEP/SETAC Guidelines leave a lot of room for interpretation. Thus, it is urged to conduct more research in the field of S-LCA, and a main way to contribute to its further development is through case studies. This research aims to contribute in this way by developing and applying a S-LCA methodology to a case study of the ZERO BRINE project in the Netherlands. The ZERO BRINE project is a European Union-funded partnership that works on zero liquid discharge technology for water, salt and magnesium recovery from brine effluents in the chemical process industry. The main objective of this thesis is to assess the social sustainability performances of the organizations in the ZERO BRINE system in the Netherlands using the UNEP/SETAC S-LCA framework as a reference, so as to determine the social impacts associated with the project as well as to contribute to the further development of the S-LCA methodology. Despite some limitations, in general, the approach proposed in this thesis succeeds in providing a profile of social sustainability which highlights the social hotspot areas that need improvements along the value chain. The results of the case study show the potential social hotspots in the ZERO BRINE chain, which should be considered when implementing the ZERO BRINE project. Personalized recommendations are offered per organization on how those hotspots can be improved. In this way, the advice may be valuable for members of management of the organizations wishing to increase the social sustainability of the business. In particular, the ZERO BRINE system may show a more positive social sustainability outcome if the recommendations of this thesis are implemented strategically.