Once a set of regionally available biowaste streams is identified and characterized, a similar analysis should be performed for pretreatment processes that can isolate feedstocks. There are a variety of pretreatment methods identified in literature, which differ with regards to the required raw materials, biowaste source, process conditions, processing steps, yields and recoveries of high-quality feedstocks. With this data, exergy analysis is a common method to characterize processes, as it links both to economic and environmental considerations, taking into account thermodynamic inefficiencies and losses. Furthermore, it can connect the pretreatment analysis to the subsequent reaction network analysis, where exergy has previously been applied as selection criteria. To evaluate the exergy requirement of biowaste pretreatment, previous literature has simulated processes in ASPEN Plus to extract enthalpy and entropy information and then compute exergetic profiles. For early-stage and large-scale evaluation of different treatments an automation of process modelling or heuristics for exergy profile estimations should be envisioned.