Implementation of safety indicators in Life Cycle Assessment

This thesis' main topic is about the implementation of safety indicators in the field of Life Cycle Assessment. The thesis bases itself on the issue of safety and quality of work environment which is one of the most relevant topics in the world of Industrial Ecology. It is first focused on a bibliographic research of the existing methods, and then on the synthesis and the implementation of a new set of indicators, based on a deep analysis of the European database of fatal and non-fatal accidents. The most important part of the thesis is the in-depth study of fatal and non-fatal accidents throughout all different work environments to produce a single value (Work Environment Characterization Factor) to summarize the risk of working in a certain economic sector. This has been presented via a series of tables showing all the intermediate steps of the calculation and the intermediate results (which are mainly coefficients, such ahs Years of Life Lost, Years Lived with Disability and Disabled Adjusted Life Years), and in the end the tables of all the Characterization Factors retrieved. The results obtained have then been scanned and compared with the original American study which, back in 2014, proposed the metric of Characterization Factors, related only to the American economic system. To make the comprehension of the method easier, the proposed method is integrated by a practical example of application to a real LCA study, which is the life cycle of the production a plastic bottle. The purpose of the case study is to be just an example of practical use of the method, and not a detailed application of the LCA tool.