THESES

Master’s theses

Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) is the youngest among the three approaches related to Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment. It is evolving throughout time and new methodologies are being incorporated into the researchers’ practices. Data collection is still the greatest constraint, being the primary data collection one of the major challenges to SLCA.

According to the Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products and Organizations (Benoît Norris et al., 2020), SLCA comprises six stakeholders of analysis: worker, actors of the value chain, local community, society, consumers and children. Among them, the worker stakeholder is the one most commonly assessed either by collecting primary or secondary data sources.

Therefore, this project aims at running an extensive literature review on the data collections methods and tools, either related to generic or specific data, applied to assessing the six stakeholders, with an emphasis on workers. Furthermore, it aims to map the most assessed indicators, regardless of the economic sector of the studies, in order to propose a harmonised set of indicators for each stakeholder, comprised with a sound definition and suggesting data collection sources and reliable tools within the literature.

This thesis must be written in English.

Contact:
Dr. Arij Chabrawi: arij.chabrawi@inab.rwth-aachen.de

Bachelor’s theses

In light of the growing relevance of social sustainability in policy and business contexts, several “social taxonomies” are emerging to define social objectives and criteria. At the same time, the Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) framework provides an established approach to assessing social impacts along value chains.
 
The aim of this thesis is to analyse the alignment and divergence between existing and emerging social taxonomies and the S-LCA framework. To this end, the student will develop a comparison table of social objectives and subsequently a mapping matrix aligning social taxonomies with S-LCA stakeholder categories and subcategories (based on UNEP 2020 Guidelines, (ISO 14075:2024), and the Social Hotspot Database).
 
The results will contribute to defining a common ground for social taxonomies, enhancing coherence and practical applicability in social sustainability assessment.
 

Requirements:

    • Interest in sustainability assessment, social sustainability, and taxonomies
    • Basic knowledge of sustainability or life cycle assessment is an advantage
    • Ability to work analytically and conduct literature research

Language: German or English

Contact:

Sarina Achterfeldt: sarina.achterfeldt@inab.rwth-aachen.de

Student Research Projects

An introductory meeting on this topic and the execution of the student research project will take place (tentatively in November). The exact date will be determined based on the number of interested participants.

If you are interested, please send an email to: roland.meyer@inab.rwth-aachen.de