Sustainability standards for biofuels : analyses of the current standards and recommendations of the future direction

Abstract

Past decades have seen development and expansion of biofuels industry around the world thanks to the environmental and economic contribution that biofuels have promised. As more and more people became concerned about the real benefits of biofuels in comparison to the conventional fossil-based options, the need for ensuring sustainability of biofuels has emerged, which, in turn, led to the development of numerous sustainability standards for biofuels over the last decade. This work analyzes and compares a selected set of nine standards developed by organizations with different scales and characteristics. Based on this analysis, major weaknesses and limitations of the standards are presented and possible recommendations addressing those weaknesses are provided. It was concluded that one of the major limitations of the nine standards is the lack of harmonization. Many standards deal with different feedstock, products, and scopes of supply chain among others. Therefore, it is suggested that international organizations, particularly the ISO, CEN, RSB, GBEP and FAO take the lead in providing the fundamental common grounds for harmonization of standards. In addition, the inclusion of technological sustainability area is recommended in order to properly address issues that are strongly dependent on the nature of current technologies used.