Social Life Cycle Assessment in Waste Pickers Associations using primary and secondary data

There is a growing interest in measuring and evaluating social aspects, such as the impact of actions, activities or decisions on society and the environment. To measure these impacts, a tool called Social Life Cycle Analysis (SLCA) can be used with different types of data or inventory sources. However, the conducted bibliographic review revealed that the quality of the data was not verified in previous SLCA studies of waste pickers associations. Therefore, this study compares the results of an SLCA using the same assessment method but with primary and secondary data, motivating the analysis of relationships between data types and assessment results. This analysis focused on the social impacts on Waste Pickers Organizations located in Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo, Brazil. The results show better impact levels in the indicators and subcategories when using secondary data instead of primary data. This shows that using secondary data leads to more uncertainties for a study with a Type I SLCA with performance benchmarks. Regarding data quality, the trend remains the same, with primary data being of better quality than secondary data.