Abstract Summary
In the development of biobased products, the choice of the feedstock, the development of the material and the design of the product are intimately linked. For example, the choice of a certain feedstock can have consequences on the possible end-of-life strategies of the product. For successful biobased product design, it is therefore proposed to adopt the Feedstock – Material – Product combination (FMP-combination)-approach (Sauerwein et al., 2023). Many FMP-combinations are possible in a biobased society. It is therefore essential to have an assessment tool that is able to discriminate between promising and less-promising FMP-combinations. Ideally, both environmental, social and economic aspects should be considered in such an assessment tool. However, the availability of holistic frameworks to assess the sustainability of biobased products is limited. Extensive assessing on multiple indicators through (Social-) Life Cycle Analysis, proves to be difficult due to data availability and methodological challenges (Rafiaani et al., 2018; Siebert et al., 2018; Van Schoubroeck et al., 2018; Weiss et al., 2012). In this research, we therefore developed an environmental assessment framework that allows to map the environmental impact of FMP-combinations. In development of this framework, we introduce the concept of biobased resource scarcity. The framework is meant to be used to monitor the potential environmental impact of FMP-combinations during their development and to assess the environmental impact of existing biobased products in a fast and limited data required way. To develop the framework, a selection of literature was used to obtain reported indicators and their frequency of occurrence. The goal was to select indicators that are determinative for the overall environmental performance of an FMP-combinations and based on the likeliness of data availability. The allocation of the indicators to their specific phase was done based on their relevance and expected impact; land use has a bigger role during the feedstock phase due to lower volumes of product per area and carbon storage predominantly takes place in the material phase. The term biobased resource scarcity is introduced to express the competition for biobased resources between biobased production chains; a plant based residual stream used for a biobased material cannot be used for other applications as well. In Figure 1 we present the framework, which is a start for a holistic framework to assess FMP-combinations on their environmental performance.
