(68c) Guiding Food Colorant Production Via Fermentation Using Techno-Economic, Life Cycle and Absolute Sustainability Assessment

In the past decade, biotechnology progress has been accelerated by higher investment flows to the growth of bio-based innovations. The impact becomes higher, considering that biotechnology has applications in the pharma, food, and chemical industries. This growth has resulted in more opportunities to develop bio-based products based on the biological transformation of renewable resources. As a result, many people take the sustainability of bio-based products for granted without proper sustainability assessment. This could lead to unexpected outcomes and innovations that face challenges towards commercialization. With this motivation, the authors developed the sustainability assessment toolbox (presented at the AIChE last annual meeting) to guide product innovation based on sustainability assessment from the inception point. The toolbox provides an efficient framework to identify sustainability hotspots and seek potential improvement areas and optimize the technology earlier.

The sustainability toolbox integrates process model, Techno-economic Assessment (TEA), and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify the economic and environmental sustainability performance of biotechnology innovations. The LCA is a standardized tool to quantify environmental impacts over a product or technology life cycle. This tool estimates potential environmental impacts at different technology readiness levels. The toolbox uses two relevant features of LCA, which are the hotspots analysis, prioritizing improvement areas, and compare different alternatives, to identify best-in-class solutions. Similarly, TEA has been extensively applied in chemical process design to predict the economic viability of processes at different technology maturity levels. TEA results allow for benchmarking the financial performance of scaled-up innovations with respect to the standard process in industrial practice. Therefore, the toolbox uses the system perspective to overcome the limits of biomanufacturing or bioprocess level by inclusion of broader impacts (for instance, biomass production). The toolbox includes a combined TEA and LCA module to show the tradeoffs between process alternatives. It uses the single-score approach to provide a combined sustainability assessment score. In addition, the toolbox integrates the Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA) model to bring the relative environmental sustainability performance to absolute terms. Subsequently, the impacts are quantified using the Planetary Boundary-Life Cycle Assessment (PB-LCA) methodology. Applying the ASEA methodology requires allocating the safe operating space for the functional unit, where we first downscale the planetary boundaries to the individual level and then upscale it to the product, sector, or country level. Different sharing principles are evaluated to show the sensitivity of this parameter.

A case study based on fermentation-based colorant production is assessed using the sustainability assessment toolbox. The case study is a representative example of low-maturity biotechnology innovation (considering a Technology readiness level of 3) with the potential to become both environmentally and economically sustainable in the near future. A functional unit of 1 kg of colorant is set as a common function (for TEA and LCA) to guarantee that inventory flows (and then the results) in LCA and TEA are taken under the same reference. As the AESA focuses on consumption-based impacts and absolute terms, the function is adapted to the market and consumption-based data on food colorants. Therefore, the functional unit for the AESA is connected to the final consumption expenditure of this product. As the toolbox includes different module dashboards, detailed economic results are illustrated, describing the cost breakdown and financial variables like internal rate of return, return on investment, and payback period. Similarly, for LCA and integration modules. Finally, the toolbox will show AESA results and transgression levels for each planetary boundary, indicating the different sharing principles used.