LCA is used to assess the environmental impacts of a product, social LCA can be used to assess the social impacts. What tools or methods have been used to assess the benefit of a product to society. For example new medicines are often assessed on their likely benefits v costs before being made available on the national health.
Hi James,
An interesting question! My first thoughts are how you define ‘benefits to society’ as that will influence the style of tools you are looking for.
I think LCA was originally designed as a tactical tool to allow a user to view the wider costs and benefits of a process or the creation of a product. This attributional approach was extended to look at the environmental consequences (called consequential LCA) and now has a social counterpart as you mention. An alternative to this ‘bottom-up’ approach that people seem to use in a more strategic way is to use environmentally extended input-output analysis (EEIOA), this is more akin to looking at ‘material footprints’. It starts with a view of the whole production and consumption of an economy viewed through input-output (IO) tables. The sector based IO data are supplemented by descriptions of environmental burdens from national environmental accounts data. However, both approaches have serious flaws, LCA suffers from ‘truncation errors’ where parts of the wider process are omitted or inefficiently apportioned leading to underestimation of costs and benefits, whilst IO is built around static data with underlying assumptions of homogeneity and suffers an ‘aggregation error’.
For the energy system there has been attempts to unify the two approaches (e.g. Bullard C.W., Penner P.S., Pilati D.A. 1978 Net energy analysis: handbook for combining process and input–output analysis. Resources and Energy 1:267–313). For materials I think this approach should work. I was involved in a study looking at how to assess the greenhouse gas implications of decisions made in the tourist industry (Berners-Lee, M., D. C. Howard, J. Moss, K. Kaivanto, and W. A. Scott. 2011 Greenhouse gas footprinting for small businesses - The use of input-output data. Science of the Total Environment 409:883-891. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969710012544) still targeted as a tactical tool, but trying to set it in a broader context.
A tool relating the environmental burden to the value created (in an economic sense), is the Eco-cost value ratio (EVR) by Joost Vogtländer (and associated eco-effective value creation). This does address benefits, but mainly in an individual and not a social manner. see: ecocostsvalue.com
A specific field where this plays strongly is regarding packaging. It has a direct negative impact and an indirect positive one (preventing product loss, e.g. food waste). This indirect positive impact goes towards your societal benefits, I'd say. How to properly deal with this balancing of the direct and indirect impacts is a basis for ongoing research. See project on 'Packaging saves food' on Researchgate.
- Badges
- Science topic