Social life cycle assessment of a desalination and resource recovery plant on a remote island: Analysis of generic and site-specific perspectives

The sustainable supply of water is crucial, especially on islands where water is scarce. Our study applied the social life cycle assessment (S-LCA), under the organizational approach, to assess industrial water production on the is-land of Lampedusa, Italy. A novel plant for industrial water production considering a circular concept was com-pared with the existing linear production plant based on reverse osmosis. An online survey, brief literature review and generic analysis were conducted to prioritize impact subcategories selection for site-specific analysis that regarded six organizations in the system boundaries. These subcategories were Local employment, Access to material resources, Promoting social responsibility, End-of-life responsibility, Health and safety (Workers), and Public commitment to sustainability issues. The social performance of organizations involved was assessed based on equal weighting and weighting with cost values. The generic analysis showed that wastewater treat-ment in Italy is underdeveloped, and water scarcity can become a serious problem in the future. The site -specific analysis based on equal weighting showed that the novel water plant results in improving social perfor-mance for all considered impact subcategories by 88 % to 91 % due to co-production when compared with the existing plant. Even increasing impacts allocation to industrial water production social benefits are still expected due to co-production. The type of weighting based on cost values showed that two organizations are the main contributors to the social performance of the novel system, and improving their corporate conduct can result in improving impacts up to 25 %, such as Public commitment to sustainability issues. To conclude, the novel plan does provide social benefits but mainly due to co-production, thus, it should be investigated more how to apply the S-LCA to linear production systems as they become more circular. (c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Institution of Chemical Engineers. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study assessed industrial water production on the island of Lampedusa, Italy using social life cycle assessment (S-LCA). The findings showed that a novel circular concept plant for industrial water production has the potential to significantly improve the social performance of the island compared to the existing linear production plant based on reverse osmosis.