Ex-ante and ex-post sustainability evaluation of a biorefinery: Lessons learned from jatropha biodiesel in Yucatan, Mexico.
Abstract
The concept of sustainability is implicit in the definition of a biorefinery. Life cycle thinking as well as environmental, social, and economic assessments is intrinsic to a sustainability evaluation. There is an abundance of methods and indicators to perform sustainability evaluations; the more approaches are used, the better will be the understanding of the interlinkages between the issues in this multidimensional problem. In this work, we present two approaches to the sustainability evaluation of jatropha plantations for biofuels in Yucatan, Mexico.