Environmental, societal, and economic challenges are driving the development of decentralised biorefineries. However, bio-based production must feature green chemistry and high process efficiency in addition to renewable feedstocks in order to achieve long-term process sustainability. This is particularly true as biorefineries commonly involve more complex reaction and separation procedures than petrochemical-based processes. Thus, a challenging but crucial task in the development of industrial biorefineries is the identification and elimination of resource-intensive process hotspots at the early-design stage.