Primary data share indicator for social life cycle assessment

Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) is a methodology to assess social impacts of products and organizations from a life cycle perspective, but data specificity and quality vary, and transparency regarding these aspects is often lacking. The product carbon footprint (PCF) industry initiatives have recently developed the primary data share (PDS) indicator to assess supply chain specificity and encourage primary data usage to better reflect specific emissions. This concept extends to social impacts, where site-specific data better reflects actual social impacts than generic data, which only indicates social risk. To transfer this concept to S-LCA, primary and site-specific data definitions were reviewed from various sustainability guidelines and three indicators were proposed: primary data share (PDSS-LCA), site-specific data share (SDSS-LCA), and company-specific data share (CDSS-LCA). These indicators were then applied to a case study on the foreground system of lithium production in Chile. Differences in the data specificity indicators were seen between the considered stakeholder groups. The Local community surrounding the lithium mining production site had the highest PDS (48%) due to a strong focus on interview-based primary data collection for this stakeholder. The CDS was above 90% for all stakeholder groups due to high data availability for secondary, company-specific data. Overall, the PDSS-LCA was 32%, 50% for SDSS- LCA, and reached 95% for CDSS-LCA. The proposed data specificity indicators were found to be applicable within the case study and increased transparency on data specificity, thereby encouraging increased use of primary and site- or company-specific data to more accurately reflect actual social impacts.