Bio-compounds production from agri-food wastes under a biorefinery approach: Exploring environmental and social sustainability

Abstract

The society and industrial sectors are facing important challenges regarding the production of bioproducts influenced by social responsibility and environmental consequences. Biorefinery development reports two important goals in the transition towards a bio-based economy: (i) the displacement of fossil-based products by biomass-based ones and (ii) the setting up of a strong bio-based industry. In this sense, research is being addressed into bio-based products opportunities from biomass residues with the aim of obtaining promising building blocks and high-added value products. Environmental and economic analysis of some bioproducts can be found in the literature. However, the social dimension of sustainability is regularly forgotten although many attempts have been performed to standardise and provide the procedures to assess the social dimension. This chapter presents the production of potential bioproducts from agri-food industrial sector and assesses their sustainability from environmental and social perspectives with the aim of identifying potential hotspots. Since the methodology to assess environmental consequences is well known and standardised, special attention is paid on the selection of the social indicators considered for analysis. To do so, social impact assessment is conducted through involved stakeholders, surveys and field experiments. Thus, the methodology to assess the social dimension has been formulated in detail considering very different social well-being-based indicators.