Abstract
Purpose
Life cycle methodologies are becoming increasingly recognised as a vehicle to support the transition to sustainable production and consumption, although Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) is still not widely applied. One of its critical points is data availability. Ideally, all upstream and downstream parts of the supply chain should be considered. The use of S-LCA databases can help overcome such an aspect. However, their use seems to be still somewhat limited in the agri-food sector.
Methods
S-LCA was implemented in the agri-food sector with the support of the Product Social Impact Life Cycle Assessment (PSILCA) database in order to increase the number of considered processes and provide a more comprehensive analysis. To this end, the product system was modelled based on site-specific data and generic data from the database, for an analysis of background and foreground processes. All the stakeholder categories provided by PSILCA (i.e. “Workers”, “Local Community”, “Society” and “Value Chain Actors”) and their relative indicators were analysed.
Results and discussion
The opportunity assessment revealed that the category “Contribution of the sector to economic development” is little affected. Nonetheless, the risk assessment showed that the five impact categories with the highest medium risk hours were “Public sector corruption”, followed by “Non-fatal accidents”, “Trade unionism” and “Public expenditure on education”. These impact categories coincide with those directly affected by the foreground processes. The risks were found to be mainly located in Italy. Indeed, the Italian agri-food sector presents some of these known issues, especially with regard to irregular work, undeclared work, violations of working time regulations, working children and labour exploitation.
Conclusion
The present study modelling was based on site-specific data and generic data from the database, for an analysis of background and foreground processes, thus increasing the number of the considered processes. Future analysis may complement the assessment with a Reference Scale Approach: by adding company-specific information for each process at sector- and country-level and thus help assessing the behaviour of the companies that are responsible for those processes in a better way. Indeed, each process at sector- and country-level results could be meant as an additional parameter to help assessing the behaviour of the companies that are responsible for those processes in a better way.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Apicoltura Luca Finocchio for its involvement and availability in data collection.
Funding
This study is part of the project funded by Programma Operativo Nazionale (PON) FSE-FESR Ricerca e Innovazione 2014–2020 (Italian National Operational Programme (NOP) ESF-ERDF Research and Innovation 2014–2020).
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Tragnone, B.M., Arzoumanidis, I., D’Eusanio, M. et al. Contribution of the Product Social Impact Life Cycle Assessment (PSILCA) database in assessing the risks and opportunities of a jar of honey production. Int J Life Cycle Assess 28, 1054–1071 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-023-02171-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-023-02171-z