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Assessing social impacts of various products, services and human activities has achieved an increasing interest worldwide. The nature of sustainability of biobased industries from a social point of view is how and to what extent they are perceived by society, and how various societies take advantages from such activities. However, an important issue is that social factors are not usually easy to be quantitatively analyzed and although the social impacts might be very remarkable, especially at the local scale, they have been not possible to be investigated in the majority of impact evaluations in the past. Despite the existence of many different methodologies towards Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) to address social impacts of various businesses and industries, most of them impartially address social performances of an industry. The aim of this paper is to highlight the main criteria that need to be taken into account in SLCA approaches for identifying the social indicators and impacts of biobased industries that is a timely topic worldwide toward climate change mitigation goals. Accordingly, considering the general approach of SLCA and particularly its inventory analysis phase for impact categories and indicator determinations, the paper provides an overview of the existing guidelines and frameworks for identifying social indicators and impact categories associated with bio-industries. In conclusion, main impact categories and indicators formulated in the existing frameworks applied to biobased industries are demonstrated as a basic set of applicable elements of social dimensions in evaluating bio-industries’ sustainability when conducting SLCAs. The state of the art for this study mainly includes leading journal articles, international reports and conference papers up to and including 2016 on SLCA in biobased industries. According to the reviewed frameworks in this study, quantitative, midpoint and site-specific data are the main elements taken into account when collecting the data for biobased product social impact assessment. This study also reveals that although SLCA is in its early steps of development and despite in numerous cases, conducting a comprehensive SLCA is not yet feasible, it has been considered to have substantially promising methodological attributes that can help policymakers and other stakeholders to quantify and assess sustainability of bio-industries from the social perspective. Recommendations for further research work concerning SLCA in bio-industries are also presented.

Considering its potential impacts on development, biobased industries require to be assessed according to the positive and negative effects they can bring to the society. Typically, the implications of biobased industries are considered in terms of economic, environmental and technical indices while social factors are usually neglected in the majority of impact assessments. This is mainly due to the fact that social issues are not easy to be quantitatively analyzed, measured and monitored. Indeed, the following issues need to be addressed: (i) how the social dimension is understood from different stakeholders’ perspective; (ii) how the social pillar can be properly integrated into sustainability evaluation methodologies which are mainly focused on environmental performance and (techno)-economic assessments of biobased industries. This review paper aims to answer these questions firstly through identifying the main social impacts and indicators of the biobased industries at local level in order to find an answer for the second question by analyzing and comparing the current methodologies for assessing social impacts in bioindustries. These methods mainly include Social Impact Assessment (SIA), Socio-economic Impacts Assessment (SEIA) and Social Life Cycle Analysis (SLCA). The latter, although is in its early steps of development, has been considered to have substantially promising methodological attributes for bioindustries’ social sustainability assessment. Although ongoing research tackles the incorporation of the environmental dimension into extended techno-economic assessments, no integration of the social pillar into such assessments has been made. Given that, this review focuses on the social dimension for integrated sustainability assessments of biobased industries to assess the main social impacts resulting from each operation or from the bioenergy sector. The current review focuses on the importance of social sustainability indicators and evaluation techniques. By discussing the methodologies for evaluating social impacts, a systemic methodology for assessing and integrating the social dimension into the sustainability assessments of bioindustries is developed, considering the four main iterative steps of an SLCA framework and three useful SLCA-based approaches including Product Social Impact Assessment; Prosuite and the UNEP SETAC Guidelines for SLCA of Products. It is concluded that the term systemic analysis implies that the whole approach needs the capacity to understand different subsystems and relations between them. Accordingly, the systemic assessment of biobased technologies should simultaneously include technological, economic, social and environmental dimensions. The result of this study identifies social impacts in the bioeconomy and particularly highlight the importance of considering social issues in biobased industries’ design and innovation.