A number of biofuel products developed to substitute fossil fuel products have failed to make it to the market considering their negative impact on ecology, due to the use of biogenic materials for producing fuel.
Most of such fuels fall short of the set RSB Standards that comprise 12 criteria and rules for biofuel production, which includes ecological as well as social principles such as human and labor rights and food security and calculation of green house gas (GHG) emissions at each stage of the production.
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To overcome the problems in biofuel generation, the scientists at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, along with the fellow researchers at HTW Berlin, Germany and Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB), have formulated and introduced an online tool to review and evaluate the sustainability of biofuel manufacture. The development of the tool took around two years and the efforts of the researchers received support from the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).
The new online tool enables the users to execute a self-assessment process for adhering to RSB principles and criteria. It computes the GHG at each stage of biofuel production i.e., from the farming stage to the production and distribution stage It utilizes a range of methodologies including RSB standard, the Californian standard, the European Renewable Energy Directive (RED) standard and the Swiss standard (for mineral-oil tax-relief) to calculate life cycle assessment (LCA) of biofuel.
The tool enables the biofuel manufacturers to evaluate their production process for RSB sustainability certification. The tool is aimed to assist all those associated in the biofuel sector including energy crop producers, biofuel manufacturers and traders.