from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Information about production and consumption impacts on the workers, the consumers, the local communities, the society and other shareholders represents the most mentioned environmental and social impacts of production processes. Many companies in metallurgy solve environmental tasks of company’s production processes, introduces Environmental management systems (EMS) to improve material, energy and economic flows, but social tasks and impacts are often underestimated. Consumers are more and more asking themselves questions about not only environmental but also the social circumstances under which a product is made and companies’ should improve their processes to ensure the products are produced in a sustainable way. End-consumers as well as the consumers who are part of each step of the supply chain represent import group of stakeholders and social impacts related with consumers must be adequately considered. Social impacts like: Health & Safety, Feedback Mechanism, Consumer Privacy, Transparency or End of life responsibility must be identified and evaluated. The contribution deals with identification and evaluation of relevant social impacts of metallurgical products or metallurgical materials production on consumers. The main objective is to determine possible industry specific social impacts and discuss whether suitable indicators for their measurements can be found. Application of indicators offered by Social Life Cycle Assessment method will be closely tested and discussed.
Keywords: social impacts, life cycle assessment, product sustainability, consumers© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.