Supply chain assessments from a social impact perspective:

enhancing social life cycle assessment for industrial applications using the example of the automotive industry

authored by: Louisa Nickel
supervised by: Ulrike Grote
Abstract: The growing awareness of the societal impacts caused by products and business practices motivates stakeholders such as customers, investors, and the public to demand greater transparency and ac- countability from companies. This growing interest highlights the importance of tools such as the Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), which is designed to evaluate a product's social impacts throughout the entire life cycle and to outline where it positively or negatively influences different stakeholder groups, including workers, value chain actors, local communities, or consumers. Despite its potential to enhance social sustainability, S-LCA is rarely applied and remains in a pilot phase in many sectors, including the European automotive industry. Its broad implementation faces significant barriers due to methodological contradictions, uncertainties, time consumption, and the chal- lenge of collecting reliable social data along value chains. In order to improve the applicability and utility of S-LCA for sectors with complex products and value chains, this work combines conceptual and em- pirical investigations to harmonize and simplify the approach. The conceptual component delves into the historic evolution of S-LCA, pinpointing key milestones and methodological challenges that hinder its widespread adoption. To leverage this knowledge, it proposes new methodological elements that address various challenges and enhance the effectiveness of S-LCA. New elements include a unified set of stakeholder groups, impact sub-categories, and indicators, along with the most recent social top- ics affecting the automotive industry. It demonstrates that a core set of social topics for S-LCA can be defined while accommodating sector-specific needs. It further introduces the Analytical Hierarchy Pro- cess as a cut-off tool to define system boundaries and focus the analysis on the most critical stakeholder groups. Combined with a new data quality rating and a refined impact evaluation approach, this method aims to increase the accuracy of assessing social and socio-economic impacts along complex value chains such as the automotive industries. Empirically, this work demonstrates the utility of the refined method by identifying positive and negative potential social effects associated with a component from the Volkswagen ID. Buzz and its multisectoral supply chain. It also sparks a new scientific discussion by exploring how IT solutions can enhance product-specific S- LCA. Different experiments for software-assisted evaluations using the LCA for Experts software and a generic hotspot assessment using the Social Hotspot Database reveal new insights into the strength and research opportunities of software-assisted and product-specific S-LCA. Overall, the refined method and the experiments in this dissertation expand the scientific foundation and outline new limita- tions and inconsistencies. While the new elements improve the applicability and value of S-LCA, further research and the resolution of remaining challenges will contribute to the future integration of S-LCA into daily business practices and maximize its long-term benefits for businesses and society.
Organisation(s): Institute of Environmental Economics and World Trade
Type: Doctoral thesis
No. of pages: 247
Publication date: 19.02.2025
Publication status: Published
Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production
Electronic version(s): https://doi.org/10.15488/18528 (Access: Open)