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Aviation biofuels are promising to reduce carbon emissions in the aviation sector. However, emerging concerns over biofuels indicate a need for sustainability analyses that take into consideration the context around biofuel production. Here, we present a novel ex-ante sustainability analysis of production alternatives for aviation biofuel in Southeast Brazil. Considering local stakeholders’ concerns, the analysis is focused on climate change, commercial acceptability, efficiency, energy security, investment security, profitability, social development, and soil sustainability. By identifying tensions between production alternatives and these sustainability aspects, we discuss opportunities for further developments, such as sugarcane ethanol-to-jet production in the short term, and in-house production of hydrogen and power with renewable energy. Additionally, producer–operator partnerships and opening the decision-making to stakeholder participation are suggested to stimulate social cohesion, and reconcile diverging interests with biobased production. Analyzing sustainability with consideration of the local context can contribute to identify opportunities for more sustainable decarbonization alternatives.

Biobased production has been promoted as an alternative to fossil-based production to mitigate climate change. However, emerging concerns over the sustainability of biobased products have shown that tensions can emerge between different objectives and concerns, like emission reduction targets and food security, and that these are dependent on local contexts. Here we present the Open Sustainability-in-Design (OSiD) framework, the aim of which is to integrate a context-sensitive sustainability analysis in the conceptual design of biobased processes. The framework is illustrated, taking as an example the production of sustainable aviation fuel in southeast Brazil. The OSiD framework is a novel concept that brings the perspectives of stakeholders and considerations of the regional context to an ex ante sustainability analysis of biobased production. This work also illustrates a way to integrate methods from different scientific disciplines supporting the analysis of sustainability and the identification of tensions between different sustainability aspects. Making these tensions explicit early in the development of biobased production can make them more responsive to emerging sustainability concerns. Considering the global pressure to reduce carbon emissions, situating sustainability analyses in their socio-technical contexts as presented here can help to explain and improve the impacts of biobased production in the transition away from fossil resources.

In recent decades, academia has elaborated a wide range of technological solutions to recover water, energy, fertiliser and other products from centralised municipal wastewater treatment plants. Drivers for this work range from low resource recovery potential and cost-effectiveness to a high demand for energy and the large environmental footprint of current treatment-plant designs. This critical review aims to inform innovators and decision-makers in water management utilities about the vast technical possibilities and market supply potentialsrelated to designing (or redesigning) a municipal wastewater treatment process from a resource recovery perspective, but also the bottlenecks., Postprint (author's final draft)