sustainability Review Social Consideration in Product Life Cycle for Product Social Sustainability Somayeh Rezaei Kalvani 1 , Amir Hamzah Sharaai 1,2, * and Ibrahim Kabir Abdullahi 1   Citation: Rezaei Kalvani, S.; Sharaai, A.H.; Abdullahi, I.K. Social Consideration in Product Life Cycle for Product Social Sustainability. Sustainability 2021, 13, 11292. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su132011292 Academic Editors: Yoshiki Shimomura and Shigeru Hosono Received: 6 September 2021 Accepted: 3 October 2021 Published: 13 October 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Faculty of Forestry and Environment, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Malaysia; somayerezai_63@yahoo.com (S.R.K.); ibrahim.kabir@fud.edu.ng (I.K.A.) 2 Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Food Security, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Malaysia * Correspondence: amirsharaai@upm.edu.my Abstract: Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) is an emerging and pivotal tool for sustainability evaluation of products throughout their life cycle. Understanding deeply published papers helps to modify methods and identify research gaps. The aim of this study is to discover the existing gap in the S-LCA of products and to find the weaknesses of the approach. The method of performing the review was a narrative review where published papers from 2006 to 2020 were included through the use of the Web of Science and Scopus databases. S-LCA is considered to be relevant to a majority of sectors and processes (agricultural, industrial, technology, energy, and tourism). However, there is not sufficient research on evaluation of S-LCA on cereal crops and livestock output. It is indicated that, in the present S-LCA studies, there has been a lack of attention paid to the society and value chain actors and final consumer stakeholders. The elements of sexual harassment and employment relationships are not considered in SLCA studies. Italy has the largest amount of cases of S-LCA studies. The major challenges of applying S-LCA (by using site specific data) is data collection, which is time-consuming. It is recommended to evaluate a comprehensive sustainability assessment by adding cost of social assessment to LCA since there has been a lack of attention on assessment of cost in S-LCA. Keywords: social life cycle assessment; social sustainability; product life cycle; supply chain 1. Introduction Sustainability is explained in the Bruntland report as ensuring that society can meet individual present needs without compromising next generation needs [1]. The important outcome of the report covers the aspects of environmental safe guide, social equity, and economic viability as the three pillars of sustainability [1] (Figure 1). The major components of sustainable development are depicted in Figure 1, which emphasizes not just the envi- ronmental but also the economic and social factors. To achieve sustainable development, environmental, social, and economic sustainability are required [2]. The main scope of sustainable development is human wellbeing by considering the needs of the present and next generation [2]. According to LCA experts, sustainable development is defined as sustainability of economic, environmental, and social aspects for the current and next generation [2]. Valente et al. claimed that sustainability is not easy to define because the meaning of social sustainability is not clear [3]. Recently, sustainability assessment has attracted the attention of many researchers [4]. Different methodologies for evaluation of sustainability of products have been produced and developed. Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) is identified as one of the three approaches (the other two are environmental life cycle assessment (E-LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC)) used for the evaluation of sustainable development of products, services, and organization [4] that have been noticed from researchers recently. S-LCA is a novel methodology in comparison with LCC and LCA [5]. S-LCA evaluates negative and positive social impacts of products and services alongside their life cycle [4]. The final intention Sustainability 2021, 13, 11292. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132011292 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability