Adapting Ergonomic Assessments to Social Life Cycle Assessment

In Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA), the health and safety aspect of workers is usually evaluated by considering the numbers of injuries and accidents; however, the work related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), which dominate occupational diseases, are often neglected in SLCA since the effects do not occur immediately. Thus, the MSDs lead to increased working absences and compensation costs, and also reduced productivity of workers. To address the gap, applying ergonomic assessment is proposed since it identifies and quantifies the health risks at work based on a set of pre-defined criteria e.g. force, posture, repetition and duration, and provides the numeric results analyzing the physical load and their sources. In the study, the application of ergonomic assessment and its indicators in SLCA is displayed to screen risks and to further improve working place design.