(195a) Building a Toolbox for Integrating Economic and Environmental Performance of Bio-Based Products

Recent trends in biotechnology have shown accelerated growth of bio-based innovations, in the pharma, food and chemical industries. The resulting monetary influx has boosted initiatives towards developing new technologies to transform bio-based feedstocks into bio-based chemicals and derived materials. However, many biotechnological ventures remain resource-intensive (both in mass and energy), hampering the urgently needed progress of numerous biotechnological innovations to meet global sustainability targets and facilitate green transition toward sustainability. This is one of the main causes for what many initiatives are delayed reaching commercialization. Therefore, an opportunity of encouraging product development in the bio-based industry should consider analyzing the challenges from the inception, necessarily involving sustainability-driven designs at primary design phases to seek for potential improvement areas and optimize the technology earlier.

The innovations in biotechnology must ensure a transition toward sustainability by consistently advancing the economic and environmental performance of resulting bio-based products. Environmental sustainability assessment is a method implemented to estimate potential environmental impacts at different technology readiness levels. Among the impact assessment methods, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a standardized tool to quantify environmental impacts over a product or technology life cycle. Two relevant applications of LCA are the analysis of the contributions of the life cycle stages to the overall performance, prioritizing improvements areas, and comparing different alternatives, to identify best-in-class solutions. Similarly, Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) has been extensively applied in chemical process design for the technical and economic evaluation of processes considering financial aspects and cost parameters.

The application of TEA and LCA studies of bio-based products is not new. Still, there is a methodological limitation to effectively deal with the tradeoffs of the economic and environmental performance. Most of the studies have reported standalone TEA and LCA application, alluding to the need for a comprehensive framework that consistently integrates the economic and environmental performance. Such an instrument is necessary to guarantee a smoother transition of the biotechnology sectors towards overall sustainability. In addition, this methodology could guide the R&D activities that are currently being explored by assessing the combined sustainability performance of bio-based initiatives. Previous studies on integration approaches reveal an absence of consistency regarding the defining criteria and methodological issues for integration. For example, LCA is a standardized methodology with four major phases: goal and scope, life cycle inventory, life cycle impact assessment, and interpretation. In contrast, TEA is a methodology that lacks a standard, so it could be performed differently by conserving the same principles (cost breakdown and financial, for example). Therefore, the integrated methodology should consider the described limitation to avoid lack of consistency. Alongside, to aid practitioners and researches in guiding the integrated use of LCA and TEA, a computer-aided tool is needed. Such a tool will also allow boosting sustainability-driven innovations in biotechnology.

A comprehensive toolbox that integrates LCA and TEA with application in the biotechnology sector will be presented in the present study. The toolbox analyzes bio-based products from a systems perspective, and life cycle thinking to avoid the burden-shifting and allows assessing the product from expanded boundaries to integrate its economic and environmental performance. Different computational tools are integrated to perform TEA and LCA, aligning systems boundaries, metrics, units, and uncertainty analysis. Firstly, mass and energy balances are generated in a process-modeling module through simulations. This allows access to inventories required to perform TEA and LCA. Then, specific TEA and LCA modules are executed to quantity and improve the economic and environmental sustainability performance. Finally, the results are combined in an integration module to illustrate the tradeoffs and provide an overall sustainability score.

A case study with application in biotechnology will be tested to show the functionalities of the toolbox. The case study will present a low maturity with a Technology Readiness Level between 1 and 2. A functional unit of 1 kg of bio-based product is set as a common function, to guarantee that inventory flows (and then the results) in LCA and TEA are taken under the same function.. The toolbox will illustrate the results in different modules, including LCA, TEA, and integrated dashboards. In the TEA dashboard, detailed economic results are illustrated, describing the cost breakdown and financial variables like internal rate of return, return on investment, and payback period. The LCA dashboard provides more information about the life cycle impacts and environmental hotspots considering midpoint and damage level results. Finally, the integration dashboard illustrates the combined results of the case study, integrating the TEA and LCA results, to arrive at a final score that allows benchmarking against existing or competing technologies the product system from a sustainability perspective.