Multi-purpose biorefineries and their social impacts: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Abstract Multi-product biorefineries are very promising industries to diversify the economy of countries since they have a productive matrix with a biological characteristic capable of processing various types of biomass with applications in pharmaceutical, renewable energy, and other industries. In this context, this research carries out an analysis of the literature on biorefineries and the methods of assessing social impacts that consider quality of life, employment, and stakeholders, among other metrics, as guided by the United Nations – UN. A systematic review combined with bibliometric, semantic, and content analysis was carried out by searching scientific documents in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. A total of 116 articles were located, of which twenty-three were selected by three researchers to compose the research. The Fleiss Kappa Index was applied to verify the agreement of the evaluators' decision regarding the inclusion and exclusion of articles, they obtained K = 0.43 above the tolerable limit defined for the inclusion of articles, which is K ≥ 0.21Therefore, all twenty-three articles were included. The results indicate that most biorefinery projects consider optimization and econometric methods and especially the employment metric, therefore, understood as insufficient for assessing social impacts. On the other hand, projects whose methods consider Social Life Cycle and Multicriteria are more consistent for assessing the social impacts of biorefineries, as they allow an analysis of qualitative and significant information.