As noted previously, one of the main limitations of the LCA methodology, as described by ISO 14040, is the lack of inclusion of work environment issues. This does not mean that
safety and health analysis of processes is not carried out by the company. Most frequently these issues are addressed ex-post, to analyse the suggestions indicated by the application of an environmental oriented LCA.
There is still a tendency for companies to treat safety, health and environment (SHE) as separate issues (Crawley, Ashton 2002). This adds complexity to environmental management systems, and makes the companies lose out on possible synergies between environmental and safety issues. From an economical point of view, this practice is not optimal; since design could be taken too far before it is found too dangerous from a work environment perspective.
Historically the first efforts in including the human factor in LCA have been made in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries have therefore produced different approaches for Work Environment- LCA (WE-LCA).
Antonsson (1996) proposed a method based on five quantitative and two qualitative impact categories. The WE-LCA is carried out in a similar way as for the external environment, with the four steps of goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. The method requires the use of an inventory of effects, instead of emissions, followed by the impact assessment. The quantitative impact categories are:
Deaths due to work related accidents
Workdays lost due to work related accidents
Workdays lost due to illness
Hearing loss
Allergies
The qualitative impact categories are:
Carcinogenic impact
Impact on reproduction
Data for the quantitative categories can be collected from single companies or trade statistics organizations. It must be noted that the final result will depend greatly on the quality and precision of this set of data. Moreover the level of detail must be balanced against the goals of the analysis. Another source of uncertainty in the method is the fact that not all impact categories can be estimated quantitatively. Work environment issues have been left out not only from LCA methodology, but also from environmental technology databases and reports of Best Available Technologies. In a project conducted for the European Commission on a selection of cases of the International Cleaner Production Information Clearinghouse (ICPIC) system, Ashford (1997) evidenced the following: the most striking feature of the case studies is their complete lack of information regarding the interactions of human beings with the production processes, materials, or products. No information is given regarding the physical or economic context for the processes Limited information is given regarding the physical form of the substances at certain stages in the process so that, should a worker be exposed, the physiologic route of entry cannot be adequately anticipated. A serious lack of integration of safety concerns with legislation, regulations and policies addressing environment and more generally industrial ecology is also to be seen.
The role of personal risk perception and involvement in occupation health and safety issues in environmental management systems has been interestingly analysed by Honkasalo (2000). In particular, in industrial environments risks seem to be perceived differently depending on the level of involvement of the perceiver. Risks caused by others, for instance global environmental issues, are not tolerated easily, because the perceiver feels that they cannot be affected. Risks taken voluntarily, for instance safety risks are more accepted. This is probably one of the main reasons for the over-estimation of environmental issues compared with the health and safety ones. Employee participation is another difference between environmental management systems (EMS) and work environment related approaches. EMS does not
usually require employee participation. In safety and health issues it is absolutely necessary to make sure that workers are involved and can actually influence the process.
In 2004 The Danish Environmental Agency came up (Schmidt, Poulsen, Andreasen et al.
2004) with guidelines on how to calculate the potential Work Environment impacts per functional unit by adding the impacts from a number of processes and activities. This method, based on the collection of goods statistics, aims at calculating the number of reported accidents per produced weight unit on the sector level. The steps are the same as for the environmental oriented LCA. The first step is the inventory procedure, where material flows are calculated for the product (with reference to a set of data obtained from the governmental statistical office). The material flows are then aggregated on relevant processes in the provided database and for each process the weight is multiplied with the impacts per weight unit for each of the affected categories. It must be noted how the method introduces a great source if uncertainty. One of the main challenges in fact is to match the actual activities with data sets in the database (many thousand product groups must be related to a small number of sectors, less than 300). Aim of the normalisation activity in the impact assessment step is to relate the total number of accidents and work related diseases with the Danish population (the same could be applied to other countries, if similar databases are available). In the following table a list of impact categories and normalisation factors are illustrated.
Person
Airway diseases, non-allergic 1.00∙10-4 1.99∙10-4
Airway diseases, allergic 7.93∙10-5 1.57∙10-4
Skin diseases 3.12∙10-4 6.19∙10-4
Musculoskeletal disorders 1.44∙10-3 2.85∙10-3
Table 1. Impact categories and normalisation factors (Schmidt, et al. 2004)
Interpretation can be done following the inventory or after the normalisation. In the first case it is possible to establish an overview of how much each of the activities contributes to the single effect categories. Following the normalisation, it is possible to depict which are the most important impact categories in the life cycle of a product. The method described is a comprehensive approach to determine the impact of work environment issues with an LCA approach. The established database associated to it covers about 80 economic sectors and provides an important tool for this kind of analysis in Denmark. It would be most useful if other countries collected the same kind of information, so that similar analyses could be done with increased reliability in other countries as well.