Social Implications of Valorizing Avocado Residues Through Thermochemical Biorefinery Pathways

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.