Sustainability assessment and decision-making is a complex task for companies and considering the new requirements of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, there will be an increased demand on companies to make sure that their impact on the environment and people is assessed. In alignment with these new requirements, this study aims to combine three methods; LCA, S-LCA, and LCC, also known as LCSA, to investigate the environmental-, social- and cost impact of a safety barrier called SVEA. This has been done in collaboration with Ramudden and Worxsafe who are the developers of SVEA. By combining these three methods the goal is to identify hotspots throughout the lifecycle to see where mitigations can be made to make SVEA even more adapted for a ‘green’ future. The environmental hotspots that have been identified are global warming potential and abiotic depletion. These were further interpreted in the discussion which shows that several improvements are possible in the life cycle of SVEA. These improvements are related to the concrete and steel that SVEA consists of. For the S-LCA, several social improvements for health and safety and the gap between employed men/women were further discussed and interpreted. Additionally, a “partial LCC” was applied in order to create an understanding of the possible trade-offs between environmental and social benefits and the cost of different improvement possibilities. The results showed that the suggested improvements can also provide economic advantages. Lastly, one big takeaway from this thesis is that the combination of LCA, S-LCA, and LCC is a promising method to reach a more holistic assessment of the three pillars of sustainable development, which can also help deal with the complexity of the new corporate sustainability reporting directive. However, as noticed when conducting this thesis, more harmonization and standardization of these three methods is still required to create a more effective and valuable implementation for companies and create a bigger foundation for LCSA.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-44816 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Arnaryd, Moa, Edenström, Kristina |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för byggnadsteknik, energisystem och miljövetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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