D6.4 – Report on Environmental Assessment

Land availability is a major factor which limits the cultivation of industrial crops for bioenergy and bio-based products. Competition for arable land is likely to intensify worldwide over the coming decades. This conflict could partially be alleviated by using so-called marginal land – provided that the land is currently not used for the cultivation of crops. Against this back-ground, the EU-funded MAGIC project (“Marginal lands for Growing Industrial Crops”, GA No. 727698) aims at promoting the sustainable development of resource-efficient and eco-nomically profitable industrial crops grown on marginal land, considering that industrial crops can provide valuable resources for high value products and bioenergy.
As part of the comprehensive integrated life cycle sustainability assessment within MAGIC, the life cycle environmental impacts associated with nine selected value chains (combina-tions of industrial crops and biomass conversion technologies) were analysed in this study. In order to cover the range of potential environmental impacts as completely as possible, the environmental assessment combined two methods: screening Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Environmental Impact Assessment (LC-EIA).