Academic Editor: Tomasz M. Karpiński
Background: Essential oils (EO) are considered as safe and sustainable
alternatives of synthetically produced industrial raw materials. While EO are
renewable resources their production is traced to land use, therefore employing
nonrenewable resources. This fact is often neglected during market up-take, which
is established on EO bioactivity efficacy. Methods: Present study is
aiming this knowledge gap through an innovative algorithm that employs spatial
yield, bioactivity performance and fundamental experimentation details to
calculate the land footprint. The proposed methodology is tested upon a concise
pool of 54 EO, of which 9 originate from 8 culinary herbs, 27 from 3 juniper
taxa, and 18 from 6 Citrus sp. crops. All 54 EO were subjected to
repellent evaluation and 44 of them also to larvicidal, encompassing in the
protocol both choice and no-choice bioassays. Results: Based on these
bioprospecting data the proposed protocol effectively calculated the land
footprint for all EO and bioassays. The repellent land footprint indicated as
more sustainable the EO from savory, oregano, tarhan, thyme, Greek sage, and
juniper berries for which each application corresponds to 3.97, 4.74, 7.33, 7.66,
8.01 and 8.32 m