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Moving from fossil‐based economies to bio‐based economies is one of humanity's most important necessities. Bio‐based economies are sustainable alternative ways to obtain chemicals, materials, and energy, and biorefineries have been proposed as promising technological schemes for this purpose. However, the economic performance of biorefineries is strongly related to the scale of the process, as different elements (energy consumption, equipment cost, etc.) vary to different degrees when the scale varies. This situation shows the importance of evaluating the performance of the biorefinery at different scales (analysis of scale) from the design stages. The problem with the analysis of these scales is that there is no unanimous definition of 'scale' and the term is used imprecisely to refer to the raw material or product. Taking this into consideration, this work proposed a strategy for determining the Minimum Processing Scale for Economic Feasibility (MPSEF) and identifying the minimum scale at which a given biorefinery can operate. As study cases, three different biorefineries, based on different raw materials (cocoyam, Andes berry, and coffee cut stems) were used to exemplify the applicability of the design strategy. The MPSEF calculated for Andes berry, coffee cut stems, and cocoyam‐based biorefineries were 9.27, 35.6 and 683 ton day−1, respectively. These results showed the application of the design strategy and how it allows the determination of the minimum amount of feedstock to be processed to achieve a positive economic performance, and from this point, to calculate the rate of return that an investor would require and the appropriate scale to achieve it. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]