Life cycle assessment: Blazing a trail for bioresources management

The life cycle assessment (LCA) is a well-established tool that has been used to provide data-driven analysis of environmental performances. LCA offers insights via selecting appropriate feedstocks, suitable technology, energy and environmental trade-off to be considered during the policy designing phase. In the present review, LCA analysis of each biomass based biorefinery and its impact assessment has been elaborated. The LCA literature clearly shows that transportation and manufacturing contributes majorly (up to 92.19%) to energy consumption. Further, the major global warming potential (GWP) was contributed by the electricity (86%) consumed in biorefinery industry. Thus, utilizing greener energy sources such as hydroelectricity or bioelectricity for energy and transportation needs can help in minimizing the environmental impacts. Further, development of integrated biorefineries can significantly decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 83% as compared to petroleum fuels and can fulfill the requirements for renewable fuel standards (RFS). The generation of multiple products at a single unit can help in adjusting the potential trade-offs and promoting environmentally beneficial processes during the designing phase for future refinery and energy systems. LCA is also a rational tool towards designing process blueprint for bioresources management through multi-products integrated biorefineries. It can be expanded further to cover the techno-economic, social, and health impacts in addition to environmental impacts (integrated sustainability assessment) for future integrated biorefineries and policy decisions.