4. Conclusion

The eco-design approach described in this article can be applied in a fairly systematic manner and has proven to be highly effective in a process of continuous improvement.

Nevertheless, the integrated consideration of environmental factors, product quality, and process characteristics remains an area where further methodological advances are still needed. Multi-criteria evaluation and design tools tailored to the challenges of food, bioproducts, and (bio)processes would be very useful in proposing relevant solutions.

Furthermore, issues related to scaling are currently under-addressed in the field of eco-design, even though they are a crucial point. Indeed, solutions are often developed and tested on a small scale and compared to solutions optimized for large-scale implementation. This inevitably leads to a discrepancy in the results obtained,...