Social LCA

Right to repair: policy & activism
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I’m building a webtool in coda.io to do a social LCA. I’ve only just started and would like to open up the process and conversation.

Here is what I have so far: https://coda.io/@taikametsa/social-lca

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Thanks for sharing this Janna!

For anyone reading who hasn’t come across the term “social LCA” before, here’s a quick description from Janna’s tool:

Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) is a method used to evaluate the social and environmental impacts of a product or service throughout its entire life cycle.

It would be amazing to have an open tool to generate social LCAs. At least, I guess that’s what you’re hoping to build, Janna? It sounds like a really ambitious project.

Where are you hoping to get the raw data for different products?

The only other free and open source software I’ve come across that does something similar is Open LCA. But of course, that only includes the environmental aspects. I have to say, I found it quite complicated to actually use and not sure I could do it without special training.

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Welcome James :slight_smile: And thank you for your questions and comments.

I’m aiming for a collaborative tools and to start with something based on groupwork. While it is important to get accurate data, it is also important to go through the processes, even though it might not be as detailed as what an expert LCA consultant might do.

I just made a canvas from 8 questions ChatGPT came up with, when I prompted them with:

What information would you need in order to write a Social Lifecycle Assessment on an organisation?

You can find the canvas here.

Another approach I’m exploring is a detective game or treasure hunt, in order to get familiar with the process and materials. For example, there could be a list of questions such as:

  1. How many lifecycle phases are there, typically?
  2. For the Stakeholder category “Local Community”, what are some of the subcategories?