Designing the social life cycle of products from the systematic competitive model

Changes affecting how product chains function can have a profound impact on human communities. Certain social life cycle assessment (LCA) methods aim to anticipate the important social effects of changes taking place in the functioning of a product’s life cycle. They therefore must identify the groups that are most affected. This paper aims to help identify the groups affected by competition beyond those usually highlighted. The objective is to propose rules to identify the organisations involved in the social life cycle of a product within a context of competition. Once these organisations are identified, it is possible to deduce which groups are affected.

We analyse how published social LCA studies describe the product system and determine its boundaries. We deduce the necessity of constructing (1) a new model (the systematic competitive model) when there is competition and (2) a cut-off criterion (significant dependency). These allow us to describe the system and determine its boundaries, and thus to draw the social life cycle, in a context of competition. We conducted a simple case study (calculation of the number of rural jobs created/destroyed by a new agricultural filière) in which two methods of representing a product system are compared. The first method is the value chain (which does not take into account the situation prior to the establishment of the planned new filière), the second method introduces the systematic competitive model, which includes the short term effects of competition with the planned activities.

The case study shows that it is possible to define the social life cycle by proceeding in this way. The two ways of representing the same real system produce very different results. The list of organisations affected and the nature of the impact to be assessed determine which actors are affected.

The use of the systematic competitive model is indispensable when competition is intense. The organisations to be included in the boundaries of the social LCA (SLCA) study are those whose behaviour with social effects is significantly affected by the changes. Furthermore, there are numerous other phenomena linked to products that provoke important social impacts, but we do not yet know how to model them. They call for further research. Environmental LCA (ELCA) and SLCA studies of the same real system will be coherent, even if the descriptions of the system and the rules of fixing the boundaries differ, provided they reflect the same scenario.