Chapter 3 - Triple bottom line, sustainability and sustainability assessment, an overview

Abstract

Biofuels have been considered particularly controversial for what concern their sustainability. Despite being based on renewable resources, their production and consumption could be associated with unintended burdens, requiring a systematic assessment toward optimizing their production and reducing their impacts. New economic paradigms have emerged in the recent years, such as those related to the green economy, the bioeconomy, the circular economy. Relying on biofuels may be seen as perfectly fitting those new paradigms. However, it is essential to ensure a real decoupling of the impact from economic growth. To enable better understanding how to assess sustainability, this chapter aims at providing an overview of sustainability concepts and related methods and approaches to sustainability assessment. Among the methods, a pivotal role is associated to methods that apply life cycle thinking to production and consumption patterns to evaluate environmental and socioeconomic burdens and benefits, in an integrated manner. It is essential to avoid burden shifting among impact categories and along steps of the supply chain. For what concerns the socioeconomic sustainability, the assessment is going beyond the profit- and finance-oriented perspectives, including instead externalities associated to the activities under evaluation.