Transition to Social Organizational Life Cycle Assessment: connections with social responsibility tools

Social Organisational Life Cycle Assessment (SO-LCA) is a methodology that assesses the social and socio-economic aspects of an organisation, or a part of it, from a life cycle perspective. According to the Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment and Organisations 2020, describing its methodological framework, SO-LCA can be applied moving from an organisation’s previous experience with management, assessment and certification tools following three pathways. The first one (Pathway 1) is based on previous applications of tools to verify and certify the organisation’s compliance with social responsibility requirements. This study provides an overview of the links between the social issues assessed in social management and certification tools and the subcategories foreseen by the Guidelines. The aim is to highlight how and to what extent these tools, already used by an organisation, can support SO-LCA implementation. This study confirms that the issues evaluated by the considered tools partly correspond to those foreseen by the Guidelines and that the acquired data can also be used for SO-LCA in relation to some categories of stakeholders. For this purpose, SA8000 provides helpful information for the assessment of some subcategories related to the stakeholder “Workers”, while GRI provides helpful information for those related to the stakeholders “Local Community” and “Consumers”.