Abstract
Objective. Social impact assessment is advocated as one of the three pillars toward sustainability. In the past, several attempts have been carried out to assess the social impact on the country level. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Human Development Index (HDI) are well known as socioeconomic indexes. However, there are still few studies for the development of the method of social impact. This study is aimed at the development of the social impact assessment method for product life cycle technique using HDI.
Methods. HDI is the general index that covered the following three components of human society; education, health and quality of life. We considered the linkage from the inventories (added value, water use, CO2) of the product to the components of the HDI. Social impact factors developed in this study enable us to connect inventory data to HDI. The change of the HDI by the input of these inventory data can be regarded as the result of social life cycle assessment (SLCA).
Results and Discussion. Three lists of social impact factor were calculated for each country based on the SLCA method. Added value factors ranged from the magnitude of 1.4×10−6 to 2.4×10−3 (HDI/US$/p), the score of developing country are higher than that of developed country. Water factor was calculated as a negative impact from 1.5×10−5 to 6.4×10−3 (HDI/m3/p), countries with little water resource have higher score. With regard to CO2 factor, the total HDI loss of the whole world caused by CO2 emission was calculated as about 1×10−16 (HDI/kg).
Conclusions. A social LCA methodology for industrial product using HDI was developed in this study. Three lists of social impact factor were prepared (for each country) to implement SLCA.
