Sustainability in the design of biorefineries, empirical explorations with Value Sensitive Design.
Mar Palmeros Parada (m.d.m.palmerosparada@tudelft.nl)
Delft University of Technology
It has been more than a decade already that controversies over the sustainability of biofuels and biobased production sparked. These controversies not only highlighted uncertainties around these innovations, but also revealed value tensions about the use of natural resources and industrial production. Thus, to address sustainability in the development of biobased production there is a need to acknowledge the subjectivity of the concept while considering stakeholders’ values and the broader social context around biobased production. In this work I present my experiences on the early-stage design of biorefineries. This work is based on the application of value sensitive design (VSD), a design approach to integrate stakeholder values into a technical design. I demonstrate this integration with two case studies, one on biojet fuel and the other on bioplastics. I show how the integration of stakeholders’ values occurred through the selection of technical features for a biorefinery concept (e.g. by-product specification). This was possible by applying VSD in a flexible way, which allowed to adapt it to biorefinery design approaches. While the value integration was limited by the project constraints and scope, it was found that the application of VSD encouraged reflection about value tensions and some uncertainties related to the development and application of the technology. Therefore, applying VSD for the early-stage design of biorefineries is suggested as way to anticipate and respond to sustainability concerns early in the development of technologies for biobased production.
