Social life cycle assessment of end‐of‐life value chains for bioproducts

Abstract

Plastic packaging has a long-standing presence in society, however, with increasing concerns about its sustainability impacts, bio-products have emerged as a promising alternative. While the environmental sustainability of bio-products has been extensively studied, social sustainability is less explored. This thesis investigates the social risks of paper packaging at the end-of-life to reduce uncertainty for bio-products in the early stage of commercialization. Utilizing the PSILCA database and secondary data, this study provides an S-LCA of paper packaging through three different comparisons—material composition (paper and plastic), end-of-life treatment method (landfill, incineration, and recycling), and geographical context (Thailand and France). The results from the study reflect the case specific nature of social risks. The social risks for paper recycling were found to be higher than plastic recycling in Thailand, whereas the opposite was seen in France. The results also highlighted a potential drawback in the worker hour activity variable as paper recycling was seen to have higher social risk than landfill and incineration, which contradicted findings in the literature. Furthermore, the results emphasised that when using secondary data to assess social risks of materials within the same country, the differences will mainly be influenced by inputs and worker hours. Overall, this thesis explores the capabilities of the PSILCA database in different contexts, adding to the S-LCA literature on downstream value chains, and offering insight into how S-LCA can help inform the social sustainability strategies of bio-product companies.