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268 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

In relation to biorefineries, Parada et al. (2017) and Valente et al. (2018)
describe that sustainability has been increasingly incorporated into biorefinery
design projects; however, social sustainability is often overlooked in project
practices, while environmental sustainability is often reduced to analyzing
the impacts of global warming, and macroeconomic effects are rarely taken
into account. The incorporation of sustainability into the design of biorefinery
projects faces the following challenges: inclusion of a comprehensive sustain-
ability analysis that considers social impacts and goes beyond microeconomics
and globalization; application during the early stages of the project when data
availability is limited; disciplinary limits that limit the scope of the analysis;
subjectivity of sustainability, usually disregarded by the use of normative
approaches. Social and sustainability methods can be useful to consider the
subjectivities of sustainability, particularly through the inclusion of stake-
holder perspectives. It has been challenging to select the most appropriate
indicators for biorefineries, especially in the social dimension, since social
and socioeconomic indicators are not well established and are not specific
to biorefineries. For the social dimension, the Social Hotspot Database
(SHDB) illustrated its potential as a starting point for screening indicators,
but showed some limitations in assessing social risks for assessed sites. It is
recommended that stakeholder participation and detailed data for the valida-
tion of the results are included, since there are currently no specific factors of
social impact characterization available for the biorefinery sector.

Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for the financial and technical support provided by CAPES Coor-
dination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Process 19224-12-5), the
Pontifical Catholic University of Parana ´ (PUCPR) in Brazil, and the Centro Studi Qualita `
Ambiente (CESQA) Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Padova
in Italy.

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