Accounting for human labour in LCA: a novel Input-Output approach

One of the most controversial topic in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) concerns the evaluation of environmental impact of human labour. The omission of human labour effects may constitute an unfortunate bias, resulting in leaking of environmental effects and, thereby, systematically misin-formed decision-making. In this paper, the innovative Bioeconomic Input-Output model is pro-posed to internalize human labour in LCA. Specifically, the production of human labor is defined as a new productive sector of a given economy: this process absorbs a portion of the national final demand in order to produce working hours. Both the standard and the Bioeconomic models are then applied for the analysis of goods and services produced by the Italian economy in 2010, and results are compared. This model aims at representing a step forward in the process of internalization of human labour externality in LCA.