LCA for the engineering analysis of the forest biorefinery

摘要

Many pulp and paper companies are considering implementation of the forest biorefinery for revenue diversification in order to improve their financial performance, implicating the addition of biomass-based products to the existing pulp and paper products portfolio. The environmental benefits associated with these bio-products may not be immediately obvious. For this reason, systematic methodologies are required to identify those process/product combinations that offer the most promising environmental benefits. In this paper, it will show that the direct application of classical LCA methodology is not well suited for this purpose. Instead, an LCA methodology based on system boundary expansion is proposed and used in an industry case study involving the implementation of an integrated forest biorefinery (IFBR) process at two different pulp and paper mills. Using this approach, it is shown that the implementation of the IFBR for the production of polylactic acid (PLA) leads to environmental benefits, but only under certain conditions. The main objective of the case study was to demonstrate the proposed approach and not to determine the best way of implementing an IFBR process. For this purpose, more detailed process design, including the analysis of several scenarios and the corresponding LCA studies, would be required.