Abstract
A large part of energy carriers and chemicals of our society come from fossil fuels; due to their critical exploitation and environmental concerns, alternative solutions should be promoted. The goal of this work is to understand the environmental impacts of different supply chains of levulinic acid production. To enable this comparison, a cradle-to-gate LCA was conducted on different kinds of biomasses, under an innovative thermochemical process called Biofine. The study concerns biomass not only of agri-food origin (corn stover, barley straw, wheat straw), but also deriving from the waste collection supply chain (organic fraction of municipal solid waste). Results show that biochemicals production from waste-derived biomass represent the lowest environmental impact solution, compared to the supply chain with biomass of agri-food origin. For agri-food biomasses, the impacts deriving from the agricultural phase are orders of magnitude more significant than those of the industrial phase, while the transport phase is the least impacting in absolute terms. For waste-derived biomasses, transport is the most impacting phase of the entire supply chain.