Guiding Innovation By Tracking the Sustainability Performance of Microbial Products throughout the Product Development Phase.

Humanity has exceeded nature’s carrying capacity which could result into irreversible changes to the environment and global Earth systems, partly due to the over exploitation of non-renewable resources. Therefore, industries worldwide are venturing into possibilities of transforming processes from unsustainable sources to sustainable feedstocks to produce chemicals, food, and other functional materials. This transition towards sustainable development requires microbial products with better sustainability performance. Measuring the sustainability performance of these products demands the deployment of a comprehensive assessment framework to quantify the impacts of the research at various product development phases.

This contribution provides perspectives on successfully integrating environmental sustainability and economic viability assessments to guide product innovation in microbial fermentation-based products. Efforts on quantifying the economic and environmental performance of bio-chemicals are analyzed early in the R&D to highlight impacts, challenges, and opportunities for guiding bio-based products. The research will showcase how a Life Cycle Assessment based impact assessment framework could be scaled-up to quantify the planetary impacts using the Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment framework. Being relevant to the bio-based materials community, methodologies and applied cases will be tested to quantify the sustainability performance of fermentation-derived products.