Multi-purpose biorefineries and their social impacts: a systematic literature review

Multi-product biorefineries are up-and-coming industries to diversify the economy of countries since they have a productive matrix with a biological characteristic capable of processing various types of biomass with applications in pharmaceutical, renewable energy, and other industries. In this context, this research analyzes the literature on biorefineries and the methods of assessing social impacts that consider quality of life, employment, and stakeholders, among other metrics, as guided by the United Nations—UN. A systematic review combined with bibliometric, semantic, and content analysis was carried out by searching scientific documents in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. A total of 116 articles were located, of which three researchers selected twenty-three to compose the research. The Fleiss Kappa Index was applied to verify the agreement of the evaluators' decision regarding the inclusion and exclusion of articles, whose result was K = 0.43 above the tolerable limit defined for the inclusion of articles, which is K ≥ 0.21. Therefore, all twenty-three articles were included. The results indicate that authors showed greater interest in the topic of this research in the period from 2017 to 2019, representing 70% of the total scientific findings in the reviewed literature. It was observed that the types of research that predominate in the studies are empirical, with 52% of the articles. The qualitative approach, however, obtained a variation of 400% in the studied period. Another important fact is that 93% of all authors published only 1, and not 61% as expected by Lotka law. Social impact studies show greater adherence to second-generation lignocellulosic biorefineries, which use the fractionation of inedible materials and projects whose methods consider Social Life Cycle and Multicriteria are more consistent for assessing the social impacts of biorefineries, as they allow an analysis of qualitative and quantitative information.