The collection of reliable data is an important and time-consuming part of the life cycle inventory (LCI) phase. Automation of individual steps can help to obtain a higher volume of or more realistic data. The aim of this paper is to survey the current state of automation potential in the scientific literature published between 2008 and 2021, with a focus on LCI in the area of process engineering. The results show that automation was most frequently found in the context of process simulation (via interfaces between software), for LCI database usage (e.g., via using ontologies for linking data) and molecular structure models (via machine learning processes such as artificial neural networks), which were also the categories where the highest level of maturity of the models was reached. No further usage could be observed in the areas of automation techniques for exploiting plant data, scientific literature, process calculation, stoichiometry and proxy data. The open science practice of sharing programming codes, software or other newly created resources was only followed in 20% of cases, uncertainty evaluation was only included in 10 out of 30 papers and only 30% of the developed methods were used in further publication, always including at least one of the first authors. For these reasons, we recommend encouraging exchange in the LCA community and in interdisciplinary settings to foster long-term sustainable development of new automation methodologies supporting data generation.

Since 2015, the sustainable development goals of the United Nations established a route map to achieve a sustainable society, pushing the industry to aim for sustainable processes. Biorefineries have been studied as the technological scheme to process integrally renewable resources. The so-called “bioactive” compounds (BACs) have been of high interest, given their high added value and potential application in pharmaceutics and health, among others. However, there are still elements to be addressed to consider them as economic drivers of sustainable processes. First, BACs can be produced from many sources and it is important to identify feedstocks for this purpose. Second, a sustainable production process should also consider valorizing the remaining components. Finally, feedstock availability plays an important role in affecting the process scale, logistics, and feasibility. This work consists of a review on the feedstocks for the sustainable production of BACs in biorefineries, covering the type of BAC, composition, and availability. Some example biorefineries are proposed using wheat straw, hemp and grapevine shoots. As a main conclusion, multiple raw materials have the potential to obtain BACs that can become economic drivers of biorefineries. This is an interesting outlook, as the integral use of the feedstocks may not only allow obtaining different types of BACs, but also other fiber products and energy for the process self-supply.