Insights on social-LCA in practice in Sweden

Other conference contribution, 2020

We aim to provide better understanding of opportunities for SLCA use. We report on interviews with representatives of 11 major organizations in Sweden with considerable focus on life-cycles. The organizations are found only to a considerably limited degree to have applied SLCA. The findings also indicate an SLCA potential due to a considerable focus on social issues and because other methods only cover short parts of product chains. Identified challenges with the methodology are SLCA not handling sustainability aspects such as from a global perspective over time, SLCA being costly to use, SLCA not handling the context dependent and rapidly changing social impacts well, SLCA maybe being too flexible regarding the user excluding indicators, and maybe SLCA addressing industries rather than the retailers to which it could matter more, among other. Due to the life-cycle interest in the organizations and Sweden, the findings can be of broader relevance.