- Can you elaborate on the methodologies being developed to analyze substitution effects between bio-based and fossil-based products within the LCA4Bio project, and how these methodologies contribute to assessing the environmental impact of bio-based technologies?
Currently the plan is to perform these two activities:
- review of how existing LCA studies have described substitution effects: comparing specific technical functionalities, product longevity, and lifetime replacement rates, and see how fossil and biobased products have performed on these, as well as consider if there are specific institutional and regulatory requirements that limit or limit the substitution of fossil product with bio-based ones.
- A survey of key stakeholders from the stakeholder’s group in T7.3 and GOUP network: the survey should reveal attitudes towards bio-based products, how substitutable to fossil counterparts, key technical functionalities, institutional restrictions, challenges and opportunities when substituting, key examples and best practices.
We also have planned the following activities but these remain still unclear and will be further defined at the start of WP4 (not started yet).
– NTNU: will provide insights from pLCA methodology perspective (@NTNU add details)
– CTA, CESEFOR: evaluate the substitution of fossil-based adhesives with bio-based ones. Focus on social-economic indicators e.g. job creation potential of substituting fossil product with biobased ones. Synergies with T4.2.
- The project aims to account for competition for resources between bio-based products and other sectors like energy, food, and feed. Could you explain the analytical approach being developed at AAU for accounting constraints to biomass and how this approach will help identify potential impacts on resource availability?
The idea is to build on ALIGNED work refining accounting of constraints to biomass. We will analyse historical and projected time series on biomass use from scientific studies, EU reports, and databases (FAOSTAT), and identify constrained vs unconstrained suppliers based on their positive or negative annual increments respectively. This is done by doing regression analysis and check which suppliers keep increasing in production (not constrained) and which do now.
- Could you discuss the role of AAU in refining the analytical approach for accounting constraints to biomass, particularly in extending the analysis to include agricultural biomass used for food, feed, and energy purposes? How will the findings from this analysis contribute to the overall objectives of the LCA4Bio project?
We will extend the ALIGNED model (regression-based analysis of production increments) to feedstocks beyond forest products: food, feed and energy purposes.
To further consider cross-competition between them, we will attempt to perform more advanced stock-and-flow modelling using either system dynamics or material flow analysis so that we can see how much biomass is available and by which sectors is used and then we can trace the dependencies (a sort of sankey diagram with the resource uses across sectors , at different points in time, is the expected result)