Improving the environmental performance of the industrial processes for the production of biomass-derived platform molecules is nowadays mandatory to achieve real sustainable bio-refineries. In this work, the sorbitol production starting from corn starch has been evaluated using a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The objective is figuring out the most impacting operations from an energy and environmental point of view and proposing ways for improving them. Two different alternatives for the production of the starting glucose, enzymatic and acid hydrolysis of corn starch, were studied for the first step. In a second stage, a plant for glucose hydrogenation based on a continuous fixed-bed reactor loaded with Raney nickel has also been considered. Finally, the different stages were integrated into a global process to quantify total environmental impacts. All the stages were implemented in Aspen Plus V10 for variables calculation to get the necessary information for process life cycle inventory. Results revealed that the acid hydrolysis is a better alternative for glucose production, mainly due to its lower energy requirements in comparison with the enzymatic pathway. In the second step, the hydrogenation of glucose, the purification of sorbitol and the compression of hydrogen provided important environmental impacts because of their high consumption of both electricity and heat. Analysis of the integrated process evidence that glucose involves an important relative contribution, higher than 60%, to all of the environmental impact categories. Interestingly, including biogenic carbon for calculations makes that CO2 fixed during corn cultivation almost compensates the emissions of the rest of the process steps, highlighting the importance of using autotrophic biomass as raw materials. Finally, based on these LCA results, technological alternatives for improving sorbitol environmental performance have been proposed and detailed. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.