A Circular Bioeconomy Chain: Indicators Applied to the Sustainable Production of Microalgae for Industrial Purposes

The importance of environmental sustainability, together with its economic and social pillar, and circular economy issues permeates more and more any aspect of our daily life through proactive initiatives, tending towards zero-waste and zero-pollutant production processes to the ongoing ecological transition. Hence, there is a need for some industries, such as the nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries, to innovate their production processes from a circular perspective, trying to ensure the minimum environmental impact, a high level of quality throughout the life cycle assessment (LCA) of its products and services and the maximum expression of the hi-tech–hi-green performance combination. This chapter aims to demonstrate how internationally shared sustainability objectives can guide and bring actual benefits through companies that embrace a circular bioeconomy approach and how this, in turn, can be the basis of a multi-output production process related to markets and bioeconomy sectors. To this end, a case was studied concerning a pilot project dedicated to research and development activities applied to the nutraceutical, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and green agriculture sectors, allowing the export of sustainable production models to places other than Sicily.