Abstract
Social impact analysis urgently needs attention in various sectors (e.g., energy, agriculture, and healthcare) and manufacturing facilities (e.g., fuel and chemical production) due to the critical roles in enhancing sustainability benefits. Properly assessing social impacts requires a consistent set of guidelines and requirements to reduce practitioner bias. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely recognized method that can be utilized to quantitatively assess three dimensions of sustainable development (i.e., social, economic, and environmental) in an integrated manner. Social life cycle assessment (SLCA) is a method following the LCA-defined principles, framework, requirements, and guidelines for assessing the social and sociological aspects of products, processes, and services and determining their potential positive and negative impacts along the lifecycle. The social impacts of a process can be investigated in many industries, including design and manufacturing. This thesis aims to provide historical data and information on social impact assessment approaches and tools that have been previously developed. As of yet, a reliable and open-source tool has not been achieved to help decision makers in both academia and industry. Therefore, a web-based and open-source tool is proposed in this thesis for assessing social impacts in eight domains(e.g., education, health, connection to nature, cultural fulfillment, leisure time, living standards, and social cohesion)by allowing multiple metrics to be used and through the comparison of two processes. Additionally, a case study for the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is conducted to compare the socio-environmental impacts of a design process. The results show that slight reductions in time consumption have dramatic impacts on mitigating emissions. The results also indicate that time consumption was the primary driver of social impacts. It is also found that pairing social analysis with environmental and economic analysis provides a more holistic outlook of how sustainable a process truly is.