Social LCA: a text mining analysis for critical review

Social Life cycle Assessment (SLCA) is an assessment technique to evaluate potential positive and negative social impacts of product/service and production using a life cycle perspective, lacking of standard and code of practice. The guidelines from UNEP/SETAC (2009) and the recent handbook for products (Fontes et al. 2014) are not sufficient for responding to a need of methodology deepening and consolidation. Hence, the present study intends to classify the wide variety of contributions on SLCA in order to trace the evolution of the theme and to define the main lines of research. The use of cluster analysis enables to map the main orientations present today in the literature. The methodology chosen to conduct a comparative analysis of the literature is the automatic text analysis. The corpus of texts inspected consists in 51 articles all strictly concerning the SLCA published between 2006 and October 2014. The scientific works were collected on the main bibliographic database selecting all available articles containing ‘Social LCA’ in the title, the keywords, in the text and in the conclusions. Through TaLTaC2 Software several articles were investigated by statistical analyses comparing different lexicon-textual profiles occurring in the corpus (Bolasco 2013). For the variable ‘year of publication’ both positive and negative specificity were calculated showing the research topic that characterize each period. The analysis of lexical correspondences shows clusters of authors identified according to the similarity of specific words and expressions. Text exploration provides an overview of different solutions currently used in social LCA studies. Therefore a plurality of methodologies on impact and risk assessment are emerged in the analyzed articles. Preliminary results show the absence of agreement on key aspects such as functional unit, system boundary, bottom-up and top-down approach etc. threating the consolidation of this methodology. Weak and strong points of this technique will be presented in a critical discussion. The conclusion from our study is that it is challenging to classify the approaches in social life cycle assessment communities, but at the same time, the critical review will help to identify the key factors on which research should really focus.