Page 66 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

Triple bottom line, sustainability and sustainability assessment, an overview 59

example, bioeconomy, circular economy, resources efficiency, eco-
innovation, and sustainable production and consumption. This calls for
reflecting upon current and future challenges of the application of LCA
as decision support tool.
LCT and LCA have a strong link with the sustainable development goals
(SDGs) mentioned before. In fact, LCT and LCA may play a role in assessing
impacts and benefits associated to several goals, both environmental and
socioeconomic ones. For example, through LCA it is possible to account
for climate change-related drivers of impact and the associated potential
damage to ecosystems due to production and consumption patterns. Simi-
larly, the assessment framework may cover impact on water, land, resources,
and so on. When life cycle thinking is applied to social issues (social LCA),
the supply chains related impact could be assessed, for example, those related
to poverty or inequalities (see section on social sustainability). Moreover, at
European level, LCA is considered the best framework for assessing the
potential environmental impacts of products, process, and systems, for
example, in the context of the European Environmental Footprint for
products (PEF) and organizations (OEF) (CEC, 2013a,b).
The literature on the application of LCA to biofuels has been thriving
¸
over the last 10years (see, e.g., Martin et al., 2015; Malca and Freire,
2011) basically highlighting the main trade-offs and the need of specific
methodological improvements to be able to comprehensively assess the
environmental sustainability of biofuels production and use.
Often the LCA studies are coupled with models and concepts coming
from other disciplines, for example, with economic modeling (Panichelli
and Gnansounou, 2017), cost-benefit analysis (Møller et al., 2014), process
optimization (van Boxtel et al., 2015), and so on.
Some of the key and most challenging aspects to be further developed
for improving environmental sustainability assessment are reported in the
following sections.

4.2 Comprehensive evaluation of environmental impacts

The Life cycle impact assessment step seeks to comprehensively address
environmental impacts, unveiling trade-offs among impact categories. Usu-
ally, in LCA practice, at least 16 different impact categories are taken into
account, such as: climate change; acidification; eutrophication, terrestrial;
eutrophication, marine; eutrophication, freshwater; particulate matter;
photochemical ozone formation; human toxicity, cancer; human toxicity,