Critique of selected peer-reviewed publications on applied social life cycle assessment: focus on cases from developing countries

The social aspect of sustainable and ‘clean’ production/manufacturing technologies is researched and understood by means of social life cycle assessment (S-LCA), a life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) tool, which is still in its infancy. In this paper, a search for all peer-reviewed publications on applied Social LCA, which have appeared in scientific journals, between O’Brien et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 1(4):231–237, 1996 ) and the latest one at the time of writing (April 2018), was carried out, using Scopus as the repository and using ‘S-LCA’ or ‘SLCA’ or ‘Social LCA’ or ‘social life cycle assessment’ as search phrases in title, abstract and keywords of publications, separately. Overall, 213 publications were unearthed, and the trend shows that there has been a near-exponential increase over time. A little over 55% of these publications—121 to be precise—were applications of S-LCA—often in combination with environmental LCA and life cycle costing analysis, in an LCSA. This paper discusses the contributions of a selected subset of these 121 publications to the body of S-LCA knowledge, with the focus being restricted to applications in developing and transition economies of the world, on the premise that there is a more urgent need to understand social aspects of production and manufacturing in these parts of the world. A SWOT analysis of S-LCA has been carried out towards the end. There is a consensus among many researchers that while LCC and E-LCA have matured a lot over time, S-LCA, the newest of the trio, is evolving slowly to become a harmonised tool which can serve as an effective complement to the aforesaid two, in LCSAs of products and processes in industry. Graphical abstract