WP12A Studies on Social Impacts
C120-122
1:20 PM - 4:40 PM, Wednesday
() Sustainable Life Cycle Assessment.
Ugaya, C1, Machado, M1, 1 CEFET-PR, Curitiba, PR, Brazil
ABSTRACT- Many methodologies have been developed with the purpose of quantifying the environmental impact, however just Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) takes into account the environmental impacts of a product from the process of extraction of the raw material (cradle) to the final disposal (grave). A plenty of proposals already had been carried through with the objective to improve LCA, in general, focusing in the environmental impacts or costs (LCC). Social impacts are often not included in these discussions, although several studies already showed that social problems are connected to several environmental impacts. Main problems of including social issues are that there is still no consensus on how these two aspects (social and environmental) are related. Even so, social issues are a main concern in Brazil, demanded by the population, several organizations and government. These factors also press companies to search for social investments. An example is the number of organizations who already have Social Reports. In this study two possibilities are discussed: to include LCA in Social Reports and to include Social Indicators in LCA. In the latter, it was studied several social indicators, as the ones used in the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and indicators of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistical (IBGE). At last, it is proposed some indicators that can be used while performing LCA in a Sustainable LCA (SLCA).
Key words: sustainability, life cycle assessment, social indicators