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Purpose *** Currently, modeling of social impacts in sustainable pavement management (SPM) is still in infant stage, which generally causes significant social impacts and triggers several social hotspot issues. Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the social impacts for pavement over its main life-cycle stages.
Methods *** To achieve this goal,...
Citations
... Transport infrastructures are necessary for modern civilizations due to the constant growth in population and related traffic needs. These infrastructures allow the movement of goods, services and people, which facilitate the connection of social and economic systems with the natural environment [1,2]. In consequence, concerns over the sustainable management of transportation systems have grown as a result of the direct impact that transportation infrastructures have on the three axes of sustainability, altering the equilibria between economic, environmental and social elements. ...
The intrinsic ability of asphalt pavement to undergo self-healing is not sufficient enough to effectively repair fractures resulting from a range of variables, including traffic load, asphalt aging and weather conditions. Consequently, the field of self-healing technology is focused on advancing crack repair techniques by employing microwave and induction heating and encapsulation amongst other healing procedures. These approaches make use of a range of additives, including waste materials and polymers, to facilitate the healing process. The present paper provides an in-depth review of self-healing technologies used for asphalt pavements, this including their conceptualization, development, application and the methods used to evaluate its performance. The self-healing capacity of materials can be influenced by various parameters including humidity, molecular diffusion, induction conditions, temperature and time. As such, treatments have the potential to enhance self-healing capacity, but with varying degrees of success depending on the specific evaluation indicator and healing situation. By examining international research, this review will also draw attention to the global relevance of the applicability of asphalt self-healing techniques used to enhance the durability and sustainability of transportation infrastructures worldwide. This paper therefore, serves as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners and policymakers engaged in the pursuit of innovative solutions for resilient and cost-effective pavement systems on an international scale. This review also proposes prospective pathways for further study that will serve as a basis for future development of the industry.
... However, S-LCA generally focuses on more on social governance and human well-being throughout the structure's life-cycle rather than quantitatively assessing the impact of pavement investment decisions on individuals. For example, studies have used scoring systems and defined social indicators such as management style, stakeholder engagement, and worker safety for pavement projects 34,35 . More recently, quantitative methods have been proposed to better understand equity impacts around pavement decisions. ...
The social pillar of pavement sustainability is understudied compared to economic and environmental pillars, making it difficult to integrate into life-cycle methodologies. While methods such as social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) exist, they usually focus on social governance rather than quantifying the impact of pavement investment decisions on communities. This study introduces a methodology to quantify the impact of road condition on vulnerable communities, specifically Environmental Justice (EJ) communities. The methodology calculates the impact of road condition on residents and analyzes fuel consumption (as an example impact) for road users during recurrent home-work trips as a function of pavement condition for EJ and non-EJ communities. It was found that EJ communities in Massachusetts are twice as likely to live near poor condition roads and consume twice as much excessive fuel during recurrent home-work trips. The proposed method is designed to integrate into existing life-cycle methods and represents a significant step towards integrating equity into pavement management decisions.
... (2) Normalization Normalization transforms quantitative and semi-quantitative indicator values into a comparable range from −1 to 1. Referring to previous social assessment research [63][64][65][66], the normalized values in this study are shown in Table 2. Quantitative indicators were normalized into five levels based on the percentages their values belong to, with positive indicators (i.e., average salary ratio) assigned positive values and negative indicators (i.e., labor dispute ratio) assigned negative values. Owing to the relatively small values of the construction time-saving indicator, interpolation with smaller intervals was used for the assignment. ...
... The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method was used to calculate weights. A hierarchical structure was constructed with social sustainability at the target level, stakeholders at the criterion level, and subcategories at the scheme level, making it suitable for executing the AHP method [64]. The importance of the indicators was compared and scored using a five-point scale by 14 invited experts. ...
The building industry has significant environmental, economic, and social impacts. The trend of construction industrialization to promote sustainable development is becoming increasingly evident. As an essential component of this process, prefabricated components provide a foundation for studying the sustainability of prefabricated buildings. This study proposes a life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) model involving environmental, economic, and social aspects to assess the sustainability of prefabricated components. The sustainability impacts on the raw material extraction and production, off-plant transport, material processing and component manufacturing, on-plant transport, and component storage stages are comprehensively assessed. The LCSA model is applied to four types of prefabricated components: interior wallboards, precast stairs, composite beams, and composite floor slabs. The results show that the precast stairs exhibit the highest sustainability score and that the performances of environmental, economic, and social pillars of four components are slightly different. These findings enhance our understanding of the sustainability of prefabricated components and broaden the scope of LCSA applications. The established sustainability assessment model is expected to help guide prefabrication scheme designs and production plan optimization, further encouraging the wider adoption of sustainable practices in construction.
... [36,35,17]] were able to assess improvement, but the results were based on arbitrary criteria and couldn't be used to draw any conclusions. Furthermore, assessing social impacts on a functional basis has been problematic because it is difficult to relate intangible social impacts to physical flows [37][38][39]. Adopt a nominal baseline approach [39,40]. Therefore, benchmarking to improve the sustainability of society is a challenge. ...
... Furthermore, assessing social impacts on a functional basis has been problematic because it is difficult to relate intangible social impacts to physical flows [37][38][39]. Adopt a nominal baseline approach [39,40]. Therefore, benchmarking to improve the sustainability of society is a challenge. ...
Smallholders are often seen as a weak point in the development of oil palm plantation production. The quality and yield of their production are considered low according to world market standards; the continuity of their production is irregular; and finally, improving the welfare of farmers is difficult to achieve. However, smallholder plantations have an important and strategic role in achieving sustainable development. This study aims to assess the social life cycle assessment of smallholder oil palm plantations in Bengkulu Province by involving stakeholders consisting of workers, local communities, farm owners, and value chain actors. A total of 600 respondents were selected using quota sampling and interviewed using a structured questionnaire. Data analysis was conducted using social-life cycle assessment, involving various social issues and relevant social indicators for each stakeholder. The findings in our research show that smallholder oil palm plantations still do not meet the minimum wage for workers, and the equipment used by workers is still very minimal in terms of security and safety guarantees. The price of palm oil continues to fluctuate, and plantation policies are constantly changing, making it difficult for oil palm owners to meet the standards and various rules that are set for managing oil palm plantations. In addition, oil palm plantations are no longer a guarantee for the fulfillment of food security conditions for household owners, workers, communities, and actors involved in the oil palm institutional chain. Our finding is that, surprisingly, there is a low level of commitment by smallholders and the government to sustainability in oil palm plantations. The Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil as standards for sustainable oil palm plantations, as well as global standards for oil palm plantations to demonstrate environmentally friendly production processes, have not been able to compel smallholders to implement sustainable development in oil palm. Various policies formulated by the Indonesian government are perceived to have not addressed the core issues faced by small-scale farmers. Policies supporting small-scale farmers, particularly those related to increasing productivity, fostering and monitoring the environmental management of palm oil plantation activities, and ensuring ownership of plantation, are necessary for the achievement of sustainable smallholder palm oil plantation development.
... SLCA is a systematic approach to assess the social impacts of a product or system throughout its life cycle, from material extraction to final disposal or recycling [46]. SLCA is a relatively new tool for which a standardized methodology is yet to be proposed [47]. However, SLCA follows ISO14040/44 [48,49], the international standard for LCA. ...
Raw rubber production is the sole foundation for the rubber product industry, rendering raw rubber to manufacture essential commodities to mankind, such as tires, condoms, surgical gloves, and so forth. Raw rubber production involves various stakeholders; however, literature focusing on the social impacts of the supply chains of raw rubber production has hereto been absent. Social life cycle assessment, a popular tool to assess the social impacts of a product or process and was deployed herein to assess the social profiles of three Sri Lankan raw rubber supply chains (crepe rubber, concentrated latex, and ribbed smoked sheets) in a cradle-to-gate manner. The Social Hotspots Database v4 on Sima Pro v9.3 was used for the analysis. Results indicated that Governance, Labour rights & decent work had been affected due to Corruption and Freedom of association & collective bargaining issues, mainly in Belarus and China. Proposed improvement options to address these touchpoints were found to be effective. If the importation of K-fertilizer shifted into countries with lower risks, such as Canada, Israel, and Lithuania, overall social risks associated with Corruption and Freedom of association & collective bargaining could be reduced by ca. 36% and 25%, respectively. As a result, social risks in the impact described above categories, i.e., Governance and Labor rights & decent work, were reduced by ca. 35–41% and ca. 17–20%, respectively. Managers may pay thorough attention to the hotspots identified herein in the first place and try to avoid them as much as possible. They may consider importation from the aforesaid low-risk countries while weighing the trade-offs with economic and environmental aspects.
... SLCA is a systematic approach to assess the social impacts of a product or system throughout its life cycle, from material extraction to final disposal or recycling (Ekener et al., 2018). SLCA is a relatively new tool for which a standardized methodology is yet to be proposed (Zheng et al., 2020). However, SLCA follows ISO14040/44 (Benoît Norris et al., 2020; The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), 2006), the international standard for LCA. ...
Raw rubber production is the sole foundation for the rubber product industry, rendering raw rubber to manufacture essential commodities to mankind such as tires, condoms, surgical gloves, and so forth. Raw rubber production involves various stakeholders; however, literature focusing on the social impacts of raw rubber production and its supply chain has hereto been limited. Social life cycle assessment, a popular tool to assess the social impacts of a product or process and was deployed herein to assess the social profiles of three Sri Lankan raw rubber supply chains (crepe rubber, concentrated latex, and ribbed smoked sheets). The Social Hotspots Database v4 on Sima Pro v9.3 was used for the analysis. Results indicated that Governance and Labour rights & decent work had been affected in its supply chain of fertilizers due to Corruption and Freedom of association & collective bargaining issues, mainly in Belarus, and China. Proposed improvement options to address these touchpoints were found to be effective. For instance, if the importation of K-fertilizer shifted into low risk countries, overall social risks associated with Corruption and Freedom of association & collective bargaining in the supply chains could be reduced by ca. 36% and 25%, respectively. As a result, social risks in the aforesaid impact categories, i.e., Governance and Labor rights & decent work, were reduced by ca. 35-41% and ca. 17-20%, respectively. Such improvements may help positioning the Sri Lankan rubber industry in the sustainability-conscious-world rubber market. Further, the methodical hierarchy developed herein is suggested to adopt in any industry to measure social sustainability subjected to the relevant refinements to the supply chains.
... In addition to the costs and end-of-life considerations, some technical aspects including the surface roughness, noise, lighting, albedo, carbonation, and earthwork should also be taken into account for fair and effective comparison (AzariJafari et al., 2016). Besides, the social dimension of sustainability is another important consideration for the total sustainability of pavements system (Zheng et al., 2020b). The impact of traffic conditions and operations should not be underestimated as it can influence the pavement life. ...
Substantial amount of resources is consumed by pavement systems, which have resulted considerable environmental impacts. Understanding the environmental impacts would provide opportunity for reducing resource consumption and informing decision-makers in the process of designing sustainable pavement. There is a lacking of comprehensive and comparative sustainability assessment of pavement systems in highly urbanized context currently. Therefore, this study aims to design and comprehensively evaluate the environmental performance of the commonly adopted pavement systems in highly urbanized context using lifecycle assessment (LCA) technique through a case in Hong Kong. According to the codes and practices of Hong Kong, two pavement systems including flexible and rigid pavements were designed based on the same road section. After that interviews with structured questionnaire were conducted to collect relevant practical information of pavement construction and maintenance from the relevant professional bodies and experts for the subsequent LCA of such designs. The LCA results reveal that the two mid-point impacts of global warming potential and mineral extraction are 21% and 54% higher for rigid pavement than for flexible pavement. Yet, the end-point results indicate that flexible pavement is associated with 64%, 65%, and 69% higher human health impact, ecosystem quality damage, and resource damage, respectively. Material production and transportation contribute significantly to the total impact in the two pavement systems. For instance, it is about 57% and 97% of the total global warming potential for flexible and rigid pavements, respectively. The overall results demonstrated that 49% higher total impact was found for flexible pavement than rigid pavement. Therefore, the use of more recycled and environmentally friendly materials can potentially enhance the environmental sustainability of both pavement systems. The findings should provide useful information to the design and selection of sustainable pavement structures in resource-scarce highly-urbanized cities.
... Some methods (e.g., Yıldız-Geyhan et al. (2017); Foolmaun and Ramjeeawon (2013); Manik et al. (2013)) were able to assess improvements but on a predefined arbitrary basis without deriving from the results. Further, assessing social impacts with a functional unit has been problematic due to the difficulty in linking the intangible social impacts to physical flows (Hosseinijou et al., 2014;Petti et al., 2018;Zheng et al., 2020), resulting in adopting a nominal basis approach instead (Zheng et al., 2020;Pollok et al., 2021); therefore, benchmarking to improve social sustainability has become a challenge. On this background, a novel approach in SLCA addressing the said lacunas is proposed herein for assessing the social status of raw rubber production. ...
... Some methods (e.g., Yıldız-Geyhan et al. (2017); Foolmaun and Ramjeeawon (2013); Manik et al. (2013)) were able to assess improvements but on a predefined arbitrary basis without deriving from the results. Further, assessing social impacts with a functional unit has been problematic due to the difficulty in linking the intangible social impacts to physical flows (Hosseinijou et al., 2014;Petti et al., 2018;Zheng et al., 2020), resulting in adopting a nominal basis approach instead (Zheng et al., 2020;Pollok et al., 2021); therefore, benchmarking to improve social sustainability has become a challenge. On this background, a novel approach in SLCA addressing the said lacunas is proposed herein for assessing the social status of raw rubber production. ...
... For instance, Hosseinijou et al. (2014) applied AHP to compare the social impacts of steel/iron to those of concrete/cement in Iran. Moreover, AHP has been deployed by De Luca et al. (2015), Zheng et al. (2020), Rafiaani et al. (2020) and Amrina and Vilsi (2015) for assessing the social impact of citrus farming in Italy, a pavement project in China, carbon capture and utilization in Europe and cement manufacture in Indonesia, respectively. However, pairwise comparison under the AHP becomes exceptionally time-consuming, with the enlargement of the model. ...
Raw rubber production is the foundation of natural rubber product industry. Despite the various social issues (e.g., substandard working conditions) reported in raw rubber production, literature focusing on social impacts has been limited. Although social life cycle assessment (SLCA) has been a popular tool to assess the social impacts of a product or process, no any functional unit has so far been developed here due to the difficulty in linking the intangible social impacts to physical flows. Furthermore, the methodologies available in SLCA are insufficient for foreseeing the social benefits after addressing the social hotspots derived from a study. On this background, this study aimed at improving the social performances of raw rubber production using a novel SLCA method addressing the above said lacunas. The Stakeholder social impact (SSI) and Social impact categorical (SIC) indexes are salient components of this method as they quantify the social impact at stakeholders’ perspective and overall geopolitical perspective, referring to a functional unit, respectively. As a pilot study, this method was applied to a rubber estate in Sri Lanka where crepe rubber was produced. “Social benefits/security” and the “health and safety” of workers in the estate were identified as the most vulnerable factors affecting the rubber production. Further, the countermeasures proposed were found to be effective in improving these elements by 25% and 70%, respectively and overall social burden by ca. 12% as indicated by SIC index. Potential use of SSI index and SIC index at country level for benchmarking the overall social impacts and possible implications in adopting the methodology developed in other geographical areas and/or in other industries are discussed.
... Therefore, it is expected that involving a wide range of subsets in the evaluation process leads the system to generate different solutions than those derived in the case of few subsets. Based on the expert opinions, Zheng et al. assured importance for all life stages [121]. ...
... Note: The shaded labels represent the management system decision variables.A.S.Mohamed et al. et al., 2016). Few studies underpinned a comprehensive social objective by stating the impacts of construction and M&R activities on workers, local community, large society, and commuters using qualitative and quantitative indicators[68,121]. ...
During the pavement life cycle, construction and rehabilitation activities and vehicle-road interactions provoke extensive environmental, economic, and social impacts. Therefore, decision-making systems are developed to derive optimal construction and rehabilitation plans, alleviate the environmental and economic burdens, and simultaneously increase the social benefits. The past studies have developed management systems with different management approaches, optimization tools, objectives, constraints, prediction models, performance indicators, evaluation techniques, evaluation boundaries, and risk paradigms. This study presents and discusses their diverse perceptions and methodologies for these management system elements. Besides the drawbacks in the adopted perceptions, the study presents the further investigations required to develop more efficient systems that optimally achieve the environmental, economic, and social objectives. The review is limited to studies of the international journals undertaken in the past 20 years, which conferred the project-level management of construction and rehabilitation of flexible pavements.
... In addition, Dreyer et al. [46] introduced the S-LCA scope reduction through the companies' sphere of influence [20]. This means that companies conducting an S-LCA should cut off processes and organizations that cannot be influenced by them [20,56]. Two years later in 2008, Jørgensen et al. [54] introduced another cut-off criterion based on expert judgement because they believed that stakeholders know best about the impacts affecting them [20]. ...
... One of the greatest debates in S-LCA research is the discussion about the appropriateness of site-specific assessments and the related mistrust in qualitative data. Although site visits provide a very detailed impression of processes, organizational attitudes and perceptions of different stakeholders, scientists such as Chhipi-Shrestha et al. [75] and Zheng et al. [56] question the practicability of field-based approaches, because they are often very time consuming and costly due to the exhaustive amount of data required for systems, processes and impact sub-categories. Sureau et al. [69] considered this the greatest limitation of a widespread application of S-LCAs and used as an example the fact that their S-LCA about Belgian alternative food distribution systems lasted nearly one and a half years and required funding, field coresearchers and the involvement of an extensive list of chain actors. ...
... This analysis underlines the finding that the value chain actors and consumers are generally less investigated. In addition, some authors base their assessment on very few sub-categories or even one single sub-category, such as Naghshineh et al. [113] did with privacy; Jasiński et al. [83] with vehicle user and pedestrian safety; Mirdar Harijani et al. [133] and Zheng et al. [56] with health and safety. One reason to exlude certain stakeholders or impact sub-categories is the lack of inventory indicators or data [134]. ...
Society’s interest in social impacts of products, services and organizational behaviors is rapidly growing. While life cycle assessments to evaluate environmental stressors have generally been well established in many industries, approaches to evaluate social impacts such as Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) lack methodological consistency and standardization. The aim of this paper is to identify past developments and methodological barriers of S-LCA and to summarize how the automotive industry contributed to the advancement or application of this method. Therefore, a qualitative content analysis of 111 studies published between 2015 and 2020 is used to gather information on past scientific and political milestones, methodological barriers impeding S-LCA and the participation of the automotive sector. The review shows that a broad range of sectors such as the automotive industry contributed to the testing and advancement of S-LCA in the past but that S-LCA remains a young and immature method. Large-scale application is impeded by major barriers such as the variety of impact categories and sub-categories, the lacking integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), issues of linking LCA structures to social phenomena or the difficult tracking of social impact pathways. Further research on standardization possibilities, the connection to political social targets and the testing of methods is necessary to overcome current barriers and increase the applicability and interpretability results.
