Social pillar

Since life cycle assessment (LCA) can be more than an environmental impact assessment approach, chapter Life Cycle Sustainabiftty Assessment A Holistic Evaluation of Social, Economic, and Environmental Impacts discusses life cycle sustainabiftty assessment. This extends the holistic environmental LCA to account for the economic and social pillars of sustainabiftty. Lastly, chapter Embedding Sustainabiftty in Product and Process Development—The Role of Process Systems Engineers describes the practical role of process systems engineers in the implementation of sustainabiftty in product and process development. It shows some key aspects and tools that practitioners should take into account to design and develop more sustainable products and processes during material selection, process design, process and product modeling, and supply chain implications. 

Section Sustainabihty in Retrofit Design imderpins the importance of sustainability in the emerging theme of sustainable in retrofit design. Then a literature review on the areas of assessment required for retrofit design, which cover the three pillars of sustainabihty (sections Economic PiUar, Environmental Pillar, and Social Pillar), will be presented. 

Figure 11.7 Characterization of the required level of detail for assessing the social pillar in retrofit design decisions.

Since both retrofit actions can be considered together, the decision maker can opt to perform a Level II economic analysis, since it is required for the botdeneck of scale and it fits the raw material consumption bottleneck analysis. For the environmental and social pillars, the Level I will be conducted, since it is enough for a sustained assessment of both retrofit designs. 

The social pillar of sustainabihty, nevertheless, requires creating a unit system to convert qualitative data into quantitative data. The human health impact is measured on the number of healthy life years lost because of premature mortality and disability/ person/year, or so-called disabihty-adjusted hfe year (DALY)/person/year [15]. For social weU-being, the result is obtained based on 11 midpoint impacts, which are divided... 

The social pillar measures a firm s ability to address issues that are important for its workforce, customers, and society. Workforce-related factors include employment quality, health and safety, training and development, and diversity and opportunity. Customer-related factors include accurate product information and labehng, along with the impact of the product on the customer s health and safety. Social issues include human rights and the impact on local communities. 

Describe key dimensions of sustainabiUty for a supply chain. Supply chain sustainability can be evaluated in terms of social, environmental, and economic impacts. The social pillar includes the impact on the workforce, customers, and society. The environmental pillar includes resource reduction, emission reduction, and environmental product innovation. 

The last pillar can perhaps be compared with privacy in the social world. This property of life makes it possible for many biochemical processes to take place independently in a cell without disturbing one another (Koshland, 2002). 

The spectrum of BASF s activities in China ranges beyond economic considerations it is also supporting environmental and social projects, the two other pillars of sustainable development, in the country. 

We usually have a number of socially defined roles with which we identify, such as parent, educated person, good listener, political activist, or pillar of the community. We also commonly identify with other people an insult to my spouse is an insult to me, and the like. Identifying with people we think of as role models, heroes and heroines, is also quite common. These heroes and heroines can be losers in the conventional social sense also recall our discussion of secondary gains in the previous chapter. 

Life cycle costing (LCC), also called life cycle management (LCM), is another toolbox based on life cycle concepts [83, 84]. It includes aspects related to the three pillars of sustainability an environmental tool, an economic tool and a social tool. 

Because of its approach directed towards social and environmental objectives allied to economic performance, the eco-logistic driver is represented as a virtuous loop combining the three pillars of sustainable development applied to logistics (see Figure 4.5). 

The decision maker has now to evaluate the tradeoffs between the time spent in the analysis and the reward obtained from the selected analysis. For the bottleneck of scale the decision maker is obliged to conduct an investment analysis, otherwise any company will accept a new acquisition without knowing about it is viability. Regarding the environmental and social aspects, the replacement of the equipment will influence these pillars only slightly. The addition of the chromatographic column will only reduce time, so effluents, raw material consumption, and workers conditions would remain the same. 

Therefore the decision maker can opt for a Level II economic analysis and a Level I environmental and social analysis. With respect to the botdeneck of raw material consumption, Level I analysis is recommended to all pillars. 

Being different from other approaches to assess fife cycle sustainability, PROSUITE methodology utiHzes five endpoint impacts, which reduce the risk of overlapping between three pillars of SustainabiHty. For example, the indicator of income, which can be used as a pathway to social SustainabiHty, brings better quality of life. At the same time, income indicator can be considered under the economic sustainabihty point of view [14],... 

Because of the imbalance of available studies on social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability, it is essential to create a common framework to include all three pillars with equal importance. The contribution of the common framework does not only lie in providing a comprehensive point of view of a product sustainability over its life cycle, but also assists the designers, policymakers, and planners in promoting a socially inclusive product/service. 

In summary, LCSA is a hohstic approach to assess the life cycle sustainability of a product/service, which is inclusive for three pillars of sustainability. It overcomes the difficulty in quantifying social indicators to provide relatively indicative quantitative results. 

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