SantanKumar Chaurasiya

Seaweed-based biostimulants have emerged as promising sustainable agricultural inputs due to their potential to enhance crop productivity, improve nutrient use efficiency, and increase tolerance to abiotic stresses, thereby reducing dependence on synthetic fertilizers. However, the environmental performance of their production systems remains insufficiently quantified. This study presents a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) of a formulated seaweed-based biostimulant derived from Kappaphycus alvarezii, based on representation of a real-world industrial-scale production system in India. Environmental impacts were evaluated across cultivation, biomass transport, sap extraction, and packaging stages using the ReCiPe 2016 midpoint method, with a functional unit of 1 L of packaged commercial seaweed biostimulant at the factory gate. Results indicate that the baseline raft-cultivation system, climate change impact was 0.123 kg CO2-eq per L of packaged commercial biostimulant. Packaging accounts for approximately 74% of cradle-to-gate climate change impacts, primarily due to plastic material production, while extraction contributes ∼21%, largely driven by electricity consumption (>92% within the stage). In contrast, cultivation contributes less than 5% of total cradle-to-gate impacts, with wild harvest having higher impact across most categories compared to raft-based methods. Within raft-based cultivation, polypropylene ropes (53.4%) and HDPE nets (34.6%) account for nearly 88% of impacts, whereas diesel use dominates wild harvesting (∼86.4%). Also, sensitivity analysis shows that increasing transport distance from 50 km to 300 km can increase total climate change impacts by ∼45. An additional multimodal transport scenario (road–sea–road), representing potential international biomass sourcing, resulted in higher transport-related impacts but did not alter the identification of packaging and extraction as the dominant environmental hotspots. Packaging sensitivity analysis indicates that replacing 50% of virgin HDPE with recycled material reduces overall climate change impacts by ∼18.40%. An exploratory baseline substitution scenario, based on nutrient-equivalent offsets of potassium and phosphorus using a system expansion approach, indicates that partial substitution of conventional fertilizers can reduce climate change impacts by approximately 17%. This represents a conservative estimate because it excludes additional field-validated biostimulant effects, such as improved nutrient-use efficiency and crop productivity, which may provide further environmental benefits.

This study reviews life cycle assessments of seaweed-based biorefineries, identifying environmental hotspots, mitigation levers, and the potential of seaweed-derived products to support low-carbon and circular bioeconomy transitions.

The transformation of plastic waste into valuable products remains a significant challenge for sustainable manufacturing.

Being one of the most important staple crops of the world, rice has played a vital role in slaking the calorie requirements of the masses in all the inhabitable continents of our planet. Regardless of this fact, there are many environmental concerns related to the rice production systems across the globe. One of the major worries is the emission of lethal greenhouse gases as a result of the different steps and procedures concerned with rice production and their contribution towards global warming. This study presents the status quo of the rice straw burning practice across the globe. It focuses on the greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the open field burning of rice residues and its direct effect on the environment, eventually contributing towards climate change. The study evidently shortlists the most profound regions contributing towards the open burning dilemma and the socio-political reasons associated with it. The study additionally discusses the different alternatives to straw burning with a clear-cut motive of throwing light on the opportunities that lie in the efficacious and sustainable utilization of homogeneous agricultural wastes. Different in-field straw management techniques related to the farmers and off-field methods related to the industry have been discussed. Predicated upon a survey of the life cycle assessment (LCA) studies across the globe, it is concluded that soil incorporation and electricity generation are the most environment friendly alternatives with an enormous scope of improvement in the coming future.