Abstract
The reuse of hard avocado (Persea americana Mill) waste is promising due to the significant concern generated by its high demand. This biomass contains physical, chemical, and even energetic properties that make it suitable for creating value-added products, such as the production of biofuels or bioplastics. This study is applied to a biorefinery that integrally utilizes all the biomass derived from hard avocado waste produced in southern Colombia to create three bioproducts: starch, and two biofilms, thereby reducing economic, ecological, and even social impacts, quantifying the sustainable return on investment, compare it with the economic return, and analyze different scenarios to identify the effect of the weighting factors of the technical, environmental, and safety indicators. The Sustainability Weighted Return on Investment (SWROIM) combines traditional return-on-investment indicators with sustainability indicators, evaluating the entire process through a single value; the higher this value, the more sustainable and profitable the process is. The results of this study determined that the biorefinery presents a SWROIM of 186.23%, an economic ROI of 38%, which indicates profitability since it is a positive and high value, a Potential Environmental Impact (PEI) of 20.8 PEI/h, and an overall production yield of 78.34%, which is a highly acceptable percentage for generating value-added subproducts from the initial biomass. The return-on-investment methodology integrates the most important aspects in sustainable development. Therefore, it is a comprehensive study that demonstrated a strong environmental cost-benefit balance.
