Developing a socio-economic framework for the assessment of rural biorefinery projects

A rural biorefinery is a facility set up in a territory which transforms local biomass into a wide range of products and energy. Contrary to the port biorefineries where raw materials are mainly imported, their sourcing is carried out on a more restricted area or even on a local area. Indeed, they are characterized by the importance of their integration process as they maintain more or less close links with the territory, especially with the farming community. In addition to being a source of income for farmers, these biorefineries create new opportunities for non-farm sectors. Recently, research has been conducted to assess biorefinery sustainability. However, the balance between the three pillars of sustainable development is not established as studies focus more on environmental assessments to the detriment of socio-economic dimensions. In addition, socio-economic assessments of rural agro-industrial projects are often limited to economic indices, which are not sufficient to evaluate the fallout on the territory. Then, the purpose of this paper is to propose a socio-economic evaluation grid to measure the territorial embeddedness of rural biorefineries.