Development of Biorefineries in the Bioeconomy: A Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis among European Countries

Abstract

This study aims to identify the configurational conditions that characterize the establishment of biorefineries in 20 European countries. After determining the conditions which support a bioeconomy transition, secondary data from national sources are used to represent their existing conditions within respective countries. Then, a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is employed to compare and contrast the effect of varying combinations of the selected conditions on the development of biorefineries. The conditions chosen include coherent bioeconomy strategies, network intensity of regional bioclusters, intellectual capital, and natural resource availability. Our results reveal that the configuration of a coherent bioeconomy strategy, sizable public spending on R&D, abundant biomass supply, and a high level of network intensity is sufficient to explain the pronounced biorefineries development among some European countries. We recommend that countries with fragmented approaches review and redesign the policy and regulatory framework to create a holistic and consistent bioeconomy strategy, taking into account the configurations of conditions as an important prerequisite. In particular, factors such as the lack of best practice examples, the low level of public spending on research and development, the economic capacities for a skilled workforce in addition to the sustainable supply of raw materials should be addressed as focal points.

Resilience Challenge Salience in Bioeconomy Policies: A Global Analysis

“…Intuitively, it is also harder to identify the same quantity and quality of challenges as, say, in the environment category. However, the one major issue that is commonly discussed in the field is -the scarcity of skilled labor (Bröring and Vanacker 2022;Ding and Grundmann 2022;Pascoli et al 2022)-is indeed also the most commonly discussed issue in bioeconomy policies.…”

Reflecting Regional Conditions in Circular Bioeconomy Scenarios: A Multi-Criteria Approach for Matching Technologies and Regions

“…By applying the search terms driver and barrier in combination with terms referring to the CBE, we received 286 results from the Web of Science database. We first scanned the titles and identified 28 studies as potentially relevant, from which we then read the abstracts to finally select 22 relevant peer-reviewed journal publications [10,17,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Table S1 in the Supplementary Material File S1 lists the selected studies, indicating bibliographic information and the context.…”

Human Health and Ecosystem Quality Benefits with Life Cycle Assessment Due to Fungicides Elimination in Agriculture

“…In 2019, approximately 42,000, 55,430, and 255,870 ktonnes of fruits, vegetables [53], and cereals [54], respectively, were produced in Europe with conventional farming [55,56]. It should be mentioned that non-edible parts of these agricultural products and rapeseed can be used for the production of biofuels [57,58] depending on the availability of money and consumers' habits [59]. Tables 2 and 3 show minimum and maximum benefits in human health per person and ecosystems quality (terrestrial), respectively, if fungicides are eliminated in fruits, vegetables, and cereals and rapeseed production in Europe.…”