Process-Activity-Based Screening of Life-Cycle Occupational Safety Burdens: Country-Specific Characterization and Production-Line Worker-Hour Allocation in 500 mL Beverage Manufacturing
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Product-level screening of occupational safety burdens requires traceable worker-hour inventories and explicit treatment of alternative workforce-allocation boundaries. This study compares four boundaries and reports conditional injury and fatality burdens for characterized pathways associated with one 500 mL bottled beverage. The 2024 manufacturing records comprise 785,659 actual productive working hours derived from working-time and shift records for separately assigned workers on six PET lines (72 line–month observations). Plant–month pooling attributes 278,268.55 h to 171,696,216 studied bottles, 5.04% more than line–month attribution; the pooling boundary is a counterfactual allocation test. The 2024 syrup supplier coefficient is 0.0005097243 h/kg from 60,347.5 contractual hours and 118,392,431 kg supplier-wide production. The agricultural source equation defines harvested-sugarcane units (h/kg cane): principal Scenario A applies recovery once and yields 3.356 × 10−8 modeled injuries and 7.501 × 10−10 modeled fatalities per bottle. Diagnostic Scenario B applies cane-based coefficients directly to refined sugar mass, yielding 1.096 × 10−8 and 1.859 × 10−10, respectively. A separate 2024 format-inventory sensitivity test evaluates bottle-count versus beverage-volume weighting; a controlled SKU comparison shows how the worker-hour allocation boundary affects the characterized ranking under common nonmanufacturing pathway inputs. These outcomes are modeled as case-equivalent screening indicators for the characterized processes, rather than observed event probabilities or complete supply-chain injury rates.
Source: Sustainability
DOI: 10.3390/su182111406
Authors: Noh-hyun Lim, Jong-Seok Kim, Gyu-Sun Cho
Institution: Hoseo University
Language: English
Subfield: Environmental Engineering
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
OpenAlex ID: W7225655279