Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of Biofuels

Abstract

There are reportedly hundreds of definitions for sustainability. Many of such definitions comprise social, economic and environmental sustainability. It has been argued that combining environmental life cycle assessment, social life cycle assessment and life cycle costing is suitable to assess the sustainability of product life cycles. (Environmental) life cycle assessment is a widely applied tool to assess the environmental burdens and impacts of product life cycles. Life cycle costing focuses on costs of product life cycles, whereas definitions or operationalizations of economic sustainability can also focus other economic matters. Social life cycle assessment addressing social sustainability is a work in progress. Four relatively important operationalisations of sustainability are considered as to their suitability for the derivation of sustainability targets. The development of targets for life cycle sustainability assessment based on these operationalisations is found to be largely a work in progress. Applications of distance-to-target methodology to assess biofuel sustainability are discussed.