In recent years several approaches to Social LCA have been proposed. Despite recognized shortcomings of those, recent development has focused more on testing existing approaches and less on finding a unifying framework that can support Social LCA to deliver on its promise: to aid decision making regarding social issues related to product life cycles. This paper offers an analysis and evaluation of the potential contribution of the body of work on Social LCA to sustainable development using the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development. A number of strengths and weaknesses from a strategic sustainability perspective are identified and recommendations to improve the support for how to deal with social issues in the product innovation process are provided.

Analysing product concepts with respect to social sustainability is a contemporary challenge for which there is little support available for product developers. Our aim was to build on previous work to support product developers in a case company with this challenge. We designed a first prototype of support for product developers to use a previously developed definition when analysing the extraction lifecycle activities associated with their product concepts. The prototype instructs users to model the location of the extraction activities and then use existing databases and indicators to analyse the social sustainability performance of each location. The databases and indicators were selected according to their relevance to scientific principles for social sustainability. We then performed initial evaluation of the support, through which we learnt that the approach may make it possible for product developers to analyse extraction activities, but the level of accuracy of analysis that is possible is not good enough for comparing the concepts in the case study decision. We discuss the implications of these challenges and suggest that it may be better to re-design our approach in order to provide learningful support for product developers or support for other decision-making in the company.

Despite the growing awareness of sustainability issues and importance of considering sustainability aspects in the product innovation process, the methodological support for doing so is still immature compared to the methodological support for considering other aspects in the decision-making, such as product performance and manufacturability. The immaturity is particularly pronounced regarding the social dimension of sustainability. In this paper we use a novel process for identifying sustainability criteria and estimating a sustainability compliance index, with the purpose of supporting inclusion of social sustainability aspects in the decision-making in product development. By including social sustainability aspects into a compliance metric, the foundations for strategic and operative decisions can be integrated. The process has been developed and tested collaboratively with industry representatives in a selected case company. Preliminary results show that social sustainability criteria can be integrated in a meaningful way into a more complete metric, and that the learning resulting from gathering knowledge and experience is a first deployable benefit of the process. Challenges and possible ways forward for further implementing social sustainability aspects in product development are also identified and discussed. The next step will be to further test the applicability of the results, by involving more representatives in the case company and from companies in its value chain.