The Future of Industry Production is Biobased, Circular - and Sustainable?

Biomass is becoming a key component of the economy, which is challenging traditional methods of assessment that were created at a time when the fossil economy was dominant. The bioeconomy is different as carbon is limited by the availability of land and sea for production. Currently, the bioeconomy mainly uses byproducts from forestry, agriculture, and other biobased industries, but in a circular economy, waste will cease to exist. Therefore, we use the term biproduct instead of waste. All products should be assumed to be used in the circular bioeconomy, so the key challenge will, therefore, not be to assure that all biproducts are utilized but rather that they are utilized in the most efficient way. This requires that different industry-sector uses of the same biomass type must fit into the same assessment framework, which is a reported challenge for the existing EPD and PEF regimes. Furthermore, the assessment framework should be able to capture which production reacts to the increased use of a byproduct. The current practices in modelling the supply chain are insufficient because the increased use of constrained byproducts only will lead to increased production of unconstrained products that can serve the same function as the demanded byproduct. The current ‘supply chain’ assessment paradigm, therefore, risks blueprinting increasing pressure on global ecosystems via the production of biobased feedstocks, leading to large unintended impacts related to emissions, reduced biodiversity and even reduced livelihood for indigenous populations.
Therefore, there is a need for an assessment framework that can assess biobased industry production, focusing on how to define system model and boundaries, how to create a world-system perspective on the availability of bio-resources and related impacts, how to account for indirect land use change, and how to model the dynamic aspects of carbon accounting. This presentation reports first-year results from the Horizon Europe project ALIGNED, combining these requirements into a common framework.