Life Cycle Assessment of Biobased and Fossil‐Based Succinic Acid

Smidt, Marieke; Hollander, Jeroen den; Bosch, H. van den; Xiang, Yang; Graaf, Maarten van der; Lambin, Anne; Duda, Jean‐Pierre

doi:10.1002/9781118933916.ch20

Cited by 12 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…When producing LA from corn, the production of biomass and the biorefinery process are the two main contributing life cycle stages dominating impacts related to global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, freshwater eutrophication, marine eutrophication, human carcinogenic toxicity, land-use, and water consumption (Table 4a). This is consistent with earlier findings, where these two life cycle stages are found to be the main drivers of overall environmental performance for LA (Gironi & Piemonte, 2011;Landis, 2010;Madival et al, 2009) and succinic acid (Breedveld et al, 2014;Smidt et al, 2015).…”

Section: Relevance Of Life Cycle Stages Across Selected Feedstock Gsupporting

confidence: 93%

“…Existing LCA studies performed on biochemicals show important trends and limitations. When biochemicals and derived products are compared to their functionally equivalent fossil‐based products, LCA results indicate that with respect to certain impact categories, biochemicals often perform better (e.g., global warming: Hanes, Cruze, Goel, & Bakshi, ; Madival, Auras, Singh, & Narayan, ; Patel et al, ; Vink & Davies, ; human toxicity: Landis, ; Papong et al, ; acidification: Hanes et al, ; Landis, ), whereas they may perform worse than their fossil‐based counterparts in other impact categories (e.g., particulate matter exposure: Landis, ; Madival et al, ; Smidt et al, ; ecotoxicity: Landis, ; Smidt et al, ; van der Harst, Potting, & Kroeze, ; eutrophication: Breedveld et al, ; Gironi & Piemonte, ; Papong et al, ; Urban & Bakshi, ; land‐use: Daful, Haigh, Vaskan, & Görgens, ; Patel et al, ). However, several studies focus exclusively on assessing global warming impacts and do not include other relevant environmental impacts, thus overlooking burden shifting from one environmental problem to another.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Environmental hotspots of lactic acid production systems

et al. 2019

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Using selected bio‐based feedstocks as alternative to fossil resources for producing biochemicals and derived materials is increasingly considered an important goal of a viable bioeconomy worldwide. However, to ensure that using bio‐based feedstocks is aligned with the global sustainability agenda, impacts along the entire life cycle of biochemical production systems need to be evaluated. This will help to identify those processes and technologies, which should be targeted for optimizing overall environmental sustainability performance. To address this need, we quantify environmental impacts of biochemical production using distinct bio‐based feedstocks, and discuss the potential for reducing impact hotspots via process optimization. Lactic acid (LA) was used as an example biochemical derived from corn, corn stover, and macroalgae (Laminaria sp.) as feedstocks of different technological maturity. We used environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), a standardized methodology, considering the full life cycle of the analyzed biochemical production systems and a broad range of environmental impact indicators. Across production systems, feedstock production and biorefinery processes dominate life cycle impact profiles, with choice in energy mix and biomass processing as main influencing aspects. Results show that uncertainty decreases with increasing technological maturity. When using Laminaria sp. (least mature among selected feedstocks), impacts are mainly driven by energy utilities (up to 86%) due to biomass drying. This suggests to focus on optimizing or avoiding this process for significantly increasing environmental sustainability of Laminaria sp.‐based LA production. Our results demonstrate that applying LCA is useful for identifying environmental impact hotspots at an earlier stage of technological development across biochemical production systems. With that, our approach contributes to improving the environmental sustainability of future biochemical production as part of moving toward a viable bioeconomy worldwide.

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Section: Relevance Of Life Cycle Stages Across Selected Feedstock Gsupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental hotspots of lactic acid production systems

et al. 2019

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“…In 2010, a number of companies began to produce first‐generation bio‐based SA in various locations across the world, with today's key producers being the companies Reverdia, Bio‐Amber, Myriant and Succinity GmbH (BASF+Purac). In line with today's practice in industrial production, most publications on the environmental assessment of SA and its derivatives evaluate first‐generation pathways, with only very few exceptions . To our knowledge, there are no previous studies on the environmental impacts of end‐products made from second‐generation SA‐based plastics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Second‐generation bio‐based plastics are becoming a reality – Non‐renewable energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) balance of succinic acid‐based plastic end products made from lignocellulosic biomass

Patel

Béchu

Villegas

et al. 2018

Biofuels Bioprod Bioref

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Bio-based and bio-degradable plastics such as polybutylene succinate (PBS) have the potential to become sustainable alternatives to petrochemical-based plastics. Polybutylene succinate can be produced from bio-based succinic acid and 1,4-butanediol using first-generation (1G) or secondgeneration (2G) sugars. A cradle-to-grave environmental assessment was performed for PBS products in Europe to investigate the non-renewable energy use (NREU) and greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts. The products investigated are single-use trays and agricultural film, with incineration, industrial composting and degradation on agricultural land as end-of-life scenarios. Both end products manufactured from fully bio-based PBS and from partly bio-based PBS (made from bio-based succinic acid and fossil fuel-based 1,4 butanediol) were analysed. We examine corn (1G) as well as corn stover, wheat straw, miscanthus and hardwood as 2G feedstocks. For the cradle-to-grave system, 1G fully bio-based PBS plastic products were found to have environmental impacts comparable with their petrochemical incumbents, while 2G fully bio-based PBS plastic products allow to reduce NREU and GHG by around one third under the condition of avoidance of concentration of sugars and energy integration of the pretreatment process with monomer production. Without energy integration and with concentration of Modeling and Analysis: NREU and GHG balance of succinic acid-based PBS products made from lignocellulosic biomass MK Patel et al.sugars (i.e., separate production), the impacts of 2G fully bio-based PBS products are approximately 15-20% lower than those of 1G fully bio-based PBS products. The environmental analysis of PBS products supports the value proposition related to PBS products while also pointing out areas requiring further research and development.

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“…Succinic acid or butanedioic acid is an striking renewable platform chemical mostly due to its functionality and valuable derivatives [11]. There is an entensive recent literature focused on its production and interest as chemical building block [5,[12][13][14][15]. Succinic acid is precursor of well-known petrochemical products such as 1,4-butanediol, tetrahydrofuran, γ-butyrolactone and polybutylene succinates among others.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study, the assessment of the environmental impacts derived from the valorization of apple pomace from the cider industry into BioSA by microbial fermentation has been performed following the LCA methodology and considering a cradle-to-gate approach. To our knowledge, there are only two peer-review studies that analyse the environmental impacts of BioSA [5,13] but considering alternative feedstocks (e.g. glucose from corn or sorghum).…”

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confidence: 99%