TBP01x 6.4 Social assessment of a process design
Welcome.
After economic and environmental sustainability we are now going to look at the social
sustainability of our process design.
The Planet people profit concept includes attention for social factors. Assessing social
sustainability was first suggested in the 90 ties as an extension to environmental and
economic impact evaluation and is therefore less developed as environmental assessment.
A difficult factor is that social impacts can be very difficult to identify, measure and monitor.
Social sustainability relates to the interaction of the product or business operation with
human beings and therefore really focuses on the local context of the business operation,
but also on the broader direct or indirect impacts on society as a whole.
It is about the impact of products and processes to workers, local communities, consumers,
the society and all value chain actors.
There are many indicators such as health, income, education, gender equality, working
conditions and food security.
This is complex and therefore it is also much more difficult to establish general standards for
implementing social sustainability.
There are several methods, still under development, which aim to measure social
sustainability. These include social life cycle assessment, such as suggested by the United
Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and
Chemistry (SETAC) and the life cycle attribute system (LCAA).
The first approach aims to assess the impact of the product and process in the perspective of
relevant stakeholders and of the impact categories, while the second method assesses how
all activities can be attribute to the impact on society.
In a SLCA the different stakeholder categories and impact categories are further divided in
subcategories.
For each subcategory indicators are identified for which data is collected.
If you like to know more about these methods, please see this recent reference of Wu et al.
for an overview of present methods and models.
These models can be applied to look at the whole value chain, from raw materials to final
product and even include recycling.
Indicators allow you to focus the data gathering. They could be different for each application
and are often chosen on the basis of relevance. This makes it difficult to compare different
assessments.
Therefore many initiatives have developed which try to standardise the set of indicators.
This is an example of the global partnership for bioenergy, GBEP.
They have agreed on 24 indicators for sustainability, of which these 8 refer to social
sustainability.
In this course we focus on biobased production of a product as an alternative for fossil
feedstocks.
For a comparison in the sustainability profile of our product it is relevant to include the
production of feedstocks and its processing but we do not need to consider the product
itself.
For our assessment of the social impact it is important to understand the local setting and
how the biobased production chain influence community stakeholders.
This scheme from Dale et al shows a social impact assessment of biofuel production.
They have chosen impact categories such as feedstock production and feedstock logistics
and so on, and have divided these in subcategories such as land condition, feedstock types
and management.
They have taken the following categories of socio economic indicators into account:
profitability, social well being, external trade, energy security, resource conservation and
social acceptability.
Data are collected using interviews, group sessions, surveys, and where relevant from
databases, such as those that collect national statistical data.
The results often consist of a mixture of quantitative data and a qualitative description. Here
you see the questions collected by the paper and pulp industry CMPC in Brazil, on an
extension project of eucalyptus plantations. You can imagine that it is quite difficult to
compare the social impacts of our biobased product to its fossil alternative.
In business decision making, the social impact analysis is often done to check whether the
proposed production does not violate any social standard and identify the important issues
for further social improvement.
Going back to our case: we include in our scope the feedstock production, feedstock
logistics, including transport and processing or conversion to PDO.
In order to assess the impacts we have to choose a set of indicators per category to collect
the necessary data and we have to decide where we will get the data from, and therefore
which stakeholders are involved. Here you see how you can proceed to make questions for
the indicators for the category feedstocks can question  Does the selling of the feedstock
provide additional income for farmers?
Does the harvest provide additional jobs?
Does our purchase of biomass provide a problem for food supplies?
Does it increase food prices?
And so on.
Of course we cannot give you the answers here, because they would be different for each
situation, but I hope you have now an idea on how such an analysis can be done.
Equally we can ask questions on the feedstock transport and logistics:  How is the transport
of feedstocks done?
Does this provide any problems in the road system?
Transport can also be an important factor in environmental and economic assessment and
therefore an important element in the decisions on the site of the factory. But also social
issues play a role.
Here you see an example of the location of the factory and the distance to plantations in the
same paper and pulp company, CMPC, in Brazil.
They had long discussions with neighbours on the traffic issue and agreed on solutions for
expected problems, for example on road maintenance.
Land management includes indicators such as land tenure and allocation.
Is the land owned by local people?
Is there a long term soil maintenance program? Are there any health issues due to toxic
compounds in fertilisers or herbicides?
How is harvesting and planting managed? These questions are crop related and depend
again on the local situation.
For example in Brazil, sugar cane plantations can be owned by individual farmers or by sugar
cane mills.
When we focus on conversion we can again ask similar questions on job availability and
education. And on acceptability of the technology used. You see that for different categories
the same questions can be asked.
For a business case all aspects of economic, environmental and social sustainability matter.
They need to be integrated and weighed for their relative importance.
That is not easy and also involves normative questions, such as questions on fair trade and
social well being, which may be viewed different in different cultures.
As mentioned before, several initiatives have led to standards for sustainable development.
In these standards principles for sustainable development have been translated into
guidelines for practices.
Companies can apply for an audit by independent organisations to get approval (or a
certificate) for their sustainability management.
For biobased production, the Round Table for Sustainable Biomaterials have developed a set
of 12 principles on environmental and social sustainability and have provided guidelines for
companies on how to comply to these principles.
This reference will give you more information.
Companies are now increasingly adopting sustainability programs. Corporate social
responsibility describes which standards are used, how the business operates in total and
they report and monitor.
The focus is than often on all the activities of the company.
Companies can decide what they implement and how they target for better performance.
This is an example from coca cola.
As we have seen sustainability is quite an important aspect of business development and is
often also stimulated by external stakeholders, such as governments, consumers and NGOs.
Social sustainability is getting more and more attention, but is still very much under
development.
It involves normative questions, which can lead to different preferences by different
cultures. In the next unit we will discuss the trends and some of the issues in global
sustainable development.
Join us in the next unit!