Social Life Cycle Assessment of brazilian Ethanol production systems using LCA and Input-Output Analysis: Workers as stakeholders

摘要: Purpose: the main goal of this study is to develop quantitative social metrics to evaluate different technological ethanol production systems in Brazil. This work shows the outcomes of a novel hybrid approach integrating Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) and Input-Output Analysis (IOA).Methods: S-LCA is the main methodology for evaluating social aspects using a life cycle approach. Into S-LCA framework, a hybrid model integrating LCA and IOA was introduced to evaluate different social effects of biorefinery scenarios considering workers in all sectors of the ethanol supply chain. Selected metrics are the number of workers (jobs), occupational accidents, and wage and education degree profiles. A case study of three biorefinery scenarios considering different agricultural and industrial alternatives is considered for this assessment. Results and Discussion: comparing the scenarios, higher job creation rates were observed when manual harvesting was employed. On the other hand, the number of occupational accidents decreased and wage and education degree profiles showed better results when mechanical harvesting was employed.Conclusions: results suggest that mechanical harvest contributes to improve work conditions. In contrast, it also contributes to decrease job creation level whose consequences depend on other socioeconomic factors. The methodology was able to quantitatively demonstrate the social metrics differences among the ethanol production scenarios.