In Colombia, different varieties of avocados are produced. In the Montes de María region, Creole-Antillean avocados are grown, but part of the production is lost due to the presence of fungi and pests, lacking marketing strategies, poor road conditions, and other factors. For this reason, we propose utilizing avocados under the concept of biorefinery to produce value-added products such as bio-oil, biopesticide, and chlorophyll from the pulp, seed, and peel, respectively. The objective is to evaluate the safety of establishing an avocado biorefinery by determining the inherent safety index of the chemical processes. The process inherent safety index is a methodology that allows the assessment of processes in the conceptual design stages. This technique identifies the characteristics of the process by determining the properties of the chemical substances, maximum operating conditions, types of equipment, construction materials, reported accidents, and other relevant factors. In the present study, the safety performance of the process is observed. A total inherent safety index of 18 points was obtained, indicating that the process is viable from a safety perspective if we compare it to the permitted limit of 24 points. This is because the process does not represent a considerable safety hazard, though some precautions must be taken due to the maximum operating temperature of 81 °C. Additionally, the chemical substances (methanol, acetone, and ethanol) necessary for obtaining bio-oil, chlorophyll, and biopesticide must be handled appropriately.

In recent years, the consumption of avocado, both fresh and processed, has experienced a significant worldwide increase due to its recognized nutritional value and beneficial health effects. However, this industrial processing generates a substantial amount of underutilized byproducts, primarily the peel and seed, leading to significant environmental and economic challenges. Fortunately, these residues are rich in bioactive phytochemicals, making their recovery an excellent opportunity to enhance the sustainability and profitability of the modern avocado industry. This bibliometric analysis utilizes data from the Scopus platform to explore the comprehensive utilization of avocado waste. By employing a biorefinery approach and computational tools, the study aims to identify and extract value-added compounds with potential applications in the food, pharmaceutical, chemical, and cosmetic industries. The results highlight that the most relevant research topics are currently focused on sustainable and comprehensive biotransformation of avocado byproducts. Additionally, there is a growing emphasis on methods for extracting valuable products, characterizing their properties, and identifying potentially exploitable active compounds. Furthermore, research is increasingly exploring the environmental and economic factors associated with new research advancements, such as emerging environmental regulations, certifications, substitutes, and technological applications. One key gap identified in recent research advancements is the lack of a sustainable diagnostic framework for avocado utilization processes in a cascade system (multiple high-value consumer products and by-products such as bioplastic). This suggests a crucial area for future research efforts.

The annual increase in the world’s population significantly contributes to recent climate change and variability. Therefore, researchers, engineers, and professionals in all fields must integrate sustainability criteria into their decision-making. These criteria aim to minimize the environmental, social, economic, and energy impacts of human activities and industrial processes, helping mitigate climate change. This research focuses on developing scalable technology for the comprehensive use of avocados, adhering to sustainability principles. This work presents the modeling, simulation, and the WEP (Water-Energy-Product) technical evaluation of the process for obtaining bio-oil, chlorophyll, and biopesticide from the Creole-Antillean avocado. For this, the extractive-based biorefinery data related to water, energy, and products are taken from the material balance based on experimental results and process simulation. Then, eight process parameters are calculated, and eleven technical indicators are determined. Later, the extreme technical limitations for every indicator are demarcated, and an evaluation of the performance of the indicators is carried out. Results showed that the process has a high execution in aspects such as fractional water cost (TCF) and energy cost (TCE), as well as solvent reuse during extraction processes (SRI) and production yield, noting that the mentioned indicators are above 80%. In contrast, the metrics related to water management (FWC) and specific energy (ESI) showed the lowest performance. These discoveries support the use of optimization techniques like mass process integration. The energy-related indicators reveal that the process presents both benefits and drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is the energy source due to the high demand for electrical energy in the process, compared to natural gas. The specific energy intensity indicator (ESI) showed an intermediate performance (74%), indicating that the process consumes high energy. This indicator enables us to highlight that we can find energy aspects that require further study; for this reason, it is suitable to say that there is potential to enhance the energy efficiency of the process by applying energy integration methods.

The global push for energy decarbonization has increased interest in hydrogen as a clean energy carrier. Biohydrogen from agricultural residues is a promising pathway for countries with strong agro-industrial sectors. This study evaluates the technical, economic, and environmental feasibility of hydrogen production from palm oil rachis in two post-conflict regions of Colombia: a large-scale facility in Bolívar and a small-scale plant in Santander. The assessment integrates Aspen Plus^® (version 14) simulations using the NRTL thermodynamic model, an attributional gate-to-gate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with ReCiPe Midpoint (H), and a techno-economic analysis. The simulated process includes biomass drying, decomposition, steam gasification, syngas cleaning, and methane reforming. A key technical finding was the non-linear relationship between feedstock composition and process yield. Although Santander’s biomass had a higher hydrogen content (9.42% vs. 6.58%), Bolívar achieved a much higher conversion efficiency (0.198 kg H₂/kg biomass) and produced over seven times more hydrogen while processing only 5.8 times more biomass. Environmental results showed clear advantages for Bolívar, which presented lower impacts across most categories compared to Santander and the fossil-based hydrogen benchmark. Bolívar achieved a Global Warming Potential of 2.47 kg CO₂ eq/kg H₂, far below the 15.03 kg CO₂ eq/kg H₂ of Santander, and showed favorable performance in particulate matter formation, acidification, and fossil resource scarcity. Economically, Bolívar was viable, with a Net Present Value of USD 25.01 million, a Benefit–Cost Ratio of 3.29, and a discounted payback period of 4.54 years. Santander was economically unfeasible under all conditions. Hydrogen production from palm rachis is technically feasible, environmentally beneficial, and economically viable when biomass availability and process integration are adequate, as illustrated by the Bolívar case.

This study applies a screening, prospective social life cycle assessment, integrating process-simulation-derived inventory data with worker-hour-based impact metrics and country–sector social risk profiles from the SOCA/PSILCA database to estimate potential risk and opportunity exposure across the avocado oil supply chain in Colombia. For the local community and societal categories, indicators such as unemployment and contribution to economic development are interpreted based on national statistics, while worker-related indicators, including fair salary and working time, are assessed in relation to sectoral wage structures and living wage benchmarks. Results suggest that potential social risk exposure is primarily associated with worker-related indicators, with contributions concentrated in refining and upstream agricultural stages, reflecting underlying labor conditions and sectoral characteristics. In comparison with a palm oil baseline scenario, increases of up to 62% in medium-risk hours for fair salary and 49% for working time are observed in the avocado oil case. Other indicators show more moderate variation, with unemployment indicator impact increasing by 24% and contribution to economic development decreasing by 7%. However, these findings largely reflect the redistribution of pre-existing country–sector risk profiles rather than system-specific or empirically validated social impacts. Consequently, the results should be interpreted as indicative of potential exposure under screening conditions, rather than definitive measures of social performance.