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ORIENTING will be at the S-LCA conference in Aachen in 2022!
This 2022, Tecnalia, Pré Sustainability, Ecopreneur and Ecoinnovazione, research partners of the H2020 ORIENTING project, will be participating at the International Conference of Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA Conference). The conference, hosted by the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule (RWTH Aachen University) and the Institute of Sustainability in Civil Engineering (INaB), will take place from 5-8th September in Aachen, Germany, in a hybrid format.
The following sessions will be chaired by ORIENTING partners’ researchers:
- Assessing the social impact of the circular economy through Social LCA – Mauro Cordella (Tecnalia) and Massimo Collotta (Henkel)
- Social LCA applications for SME’s – Rosan Harmens (Pré Sustainability) and Arthur ten Wolde (Ecopreneur)
- The Social Science basis of Social LCA – Mark Goedkoop (Pré Sustainability) and Alessandra Zamagni (Ecoinnovazione)
If you are interested, we invite you to submit your abstracts to these sessions. Deadline for submitting contributions is February 15th. For more information, visit the conferece website: https://slca-conference2022.com/
Assessing the social impact of the circular economy through Social LCA
This session aims to link social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) with circular economy (CE), which is at the core of the EU policy strategy to achieve a low-carbon, resource-efficient and environmental-friendly economy for a fair, prosperous, and inclusive society.
To link S-LCA with CE, it will be necessary the compilation of theoretical contributions and case studies. This will help to address how S-LCA can be used to assess social issues related to the CE at different levels, to assess social benefits, impacts and risks associated with circular versus linear solutions, and investigate how the use of S-LCA could be spread to support the transition from a linear to a more circular economy.
Social LCA applications for SME’s
The second session focuses on the applications of S-LCA for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). S-LCA is a novelty of the field, and the data collection can be challenging for SME’s. If we want to leave no one behind in adopting S-LCA, we should make sure that this methodology can be applied for all type of companies, not only large companies.
To achieve this goal, this session seeks for contributions that describe how S-LCA can be more suitable for SME’s; how they are currently assessing social impacts; how data can become more accessible for these companies; how to develop approaches to streamline S-LCA also through (partial) automation; and how we can make sure that social LCA is also a valuable tool for SME’s.
The Social Science basis of Social LCA
The last session explores how S-LCA must be based on social sciences, instead of being based on the same fields as LCA. This happens because S-LCA has been developed by experts who doesn’t always have social science background.
The main goal is to develop a rational and scientific basis for methodological choices. For this reason, the session wants to discuss about the analytical and normative nature of S-LCA, explicit the values and define the role of stakeholders’ perceptions. These will provide the social scientific basis underneath important methodology choices, like the selection of impact categories, the definition of stakeholder categories and, for instance, the cause effect modelling used to link inventory data to impacts, as well as a discussion on the area of protection and what we mean by mid and endpoints to name a few.