Abstract
Increasing awareness about sustainability has compelled the recent researchers to explore different methods for evaluation. Conventionally the sustainability of a process was majorly dependent on the economics feasibility. Recently need of incorporation of environmental and social concerns in overall sustainability assessment has been realized. Authors in their prior work has published a framework for performing sustainability assessment of biomass processing enterprises. The present work is on selection of sugarcane valorization pathways based on the sustainability index using the same framework. Six alternative routes are compared based on their economic, environment and social criteria. Life cycle assessment of each process is performed as per ISO 14040/44 to evaluate the environmental criteria. Integrated method of value function (MIVES) is used for consolidation of different indicators and criteria. Amongst the process alternatives considered for assessment, 1G2G ethanol route is observed to have highest sustainability index (0.864) owing to relatively lower environmental impact whereas first generation butanol production route (1GRS) had the least sustainability index of 0.090 on account of decreased yield and less products. Sensitivity analysis performed on the model showed no significant change in the ranking of the alternatives.
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SNJ conceptualized the framework and its application in selection of most sustainable process pathway for sugarcane valorization. GD and NQ performed detailed data generation and curation. SAM supervised the software modeling. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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The present work deals with comparison of six different processing routes for sugarcane to get value added products like sugar, 1G ethanol, 2G ethanol, electricity, acetone, and n-butanol by evaluating sustainability index (SI). The sustainability assessment is based on the economic, environment, and social parameters of the process; hence, decision based on SI is balanced and comprehensive. Based on the inventory data available in the literature, life cycle assessment is performed to evaluate the environmental emissions of the processing routes and multicriteria decision method (MIVES) is used to integrate different indicators and criteria to obtain a sustainability index. The work is based on the framework for sustainability assessment proposed by the authors earlier (Joglekar et al. 2019a). Such kind of an assessment can be performed for diverse areas of research that requires process pathway selection using basic preliminary data generated thereby understanding its scope of impact.
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Joglekar, .N., Dalwankar, G., Qureshi, N. et al. Sugarcane valorization: selection of process routes based on sustainability index. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 10812–10825 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16375-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16375-z