D3.1 Expanding environmental sustainability criteria to address the manufacturing and other downstream processes for bio- based products

This report describes the creation of a set of sustainability criteria for the production processes (“downstream processes”) of bio-based products, in compliance with standard life cycle assessment accounting (i.e.: ISO 14040 and EN 16760). These efficiency and circular indicators take place within a coherent set of environmental and techno-economic indicators, which are intended to be included in sustainability certification scheme. For this purpose, thresholds to these indicators are proposed and tested via case studies and data collection. In addition, these indicators’ compliance to the EN 16751 framework is assessed.

Although the full set of sustainability indicators is not yet completely known, because they are being worked in parallel with the present task, this report presents a preview of the full set (except social indicators, to be added in a further stage).

The new indicators are successfully tested on the case studies. However, the proposed science- based but relative thresholds suffer weaknesses that lead to the recommendation of using subjective thresholds based on consensus.

The set of sustainability indicators is well aligned with the EN 16751 framework so far and the STAR-ProBio is an effort pursuing the same goal of the European Standard, for instance by seeking at establishing a framework for certification schemes.