Social life cycle assessment: Methodological and implementation issues

This paper describes the development of the Social Life Cycle Assessment methodology. Introduce the debate about the inclusion of the social criteria in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and presents the actual framework. A second part presents and analyzes recent case studies published. This methodology allows increasing knowledge, providing information for decision makers and promoting improvement of social conditions in product life cycles. Its framework is at a very early stage compared to the Environmental Life Cycle Assessment and for its improvement it is necessary to carry out more case studies. One of the issues that are lacking into its development is the choice of social indicators for the inventory indicator and their standardization for the methodology application.