After increasingly assessing and communicating their environmental performances, companies have also started to give more attention to social impact assessment at product level – to gain additional insights, support internal decision making, and respond to enquiries from external stakeholders, including consumers and governments, regarding the sustainability of products. Whereas social impact assessment methodologies are already available and the industry has started to use social impact data, these developments do not yet translate into companies providing product consumer information on social impacts.
To encourage progress in this emerging field and inspire companies to ‘shout it out’, the Consumer Information Programme has developed this white paper. The paper’s primary objective is to identify good practices of product-level social impact communication that can provide inspiration, and be built upon or replicated. It identifies relevant principles, criteria and means to communicate such impacts, including recommendations on integrating social impact communication with more well-established environmental impact communication tools. While the focus lies on business to consumer (B2C) communications, the recommendations given are also valid for business to business (B2B) and business to government communications.
The target audience of this white paper is, primarily, companies and standard-setting and labelling organizations (i.e. those who communicate), but recommendations on how to support progress are also provided for governments, non-governmental organizations and relevant initiatives.
In this paper, social impacts are understood to be the consequences of positive or negative pressures on the well-being of stakeholders in a product’s lifecycle (from cradle to grave) or one of its phases (production, consumption or disposal). The focus is on impacts at product (goods and services) level, rather than at the level of a company or brand. However, it is important to keep in mind the overlap between product lifecycle impacts and companies’ wider value chain impacts. The paper is intended to link to the Consumer Information Programme’s Guidelines for Providing Product Sustainability Information.