Technical and economic assessment of trash recovery in the sugarcane bioenergy production system

• Main Authors: Terezinha de Fátima Cardoso, Otávio Cavalett, Mateus Ferreira Chagas, Edvaldo Rodrigo de Morais, João Luís Nunes Carvalho, Henrique Coutinho Junqueira Franco, Marcelo Valadares Galdos, Fábio Vale Scarpare, Oscar Antonio Braunbeck, Luis Augusto Barbosa Cortez, Antonio Bonomi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade de São Paulo 2013-10-01
• Series: Scientia Agricola
• Online Access: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-90162013000500010&lng=en&tlng=en

Mechanized sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) harvest without burning has been increasingly adopted in Brazil, increasing trash availability on the field. This study aims at showing the importance of using an integrated framework tool to assess technical and economic impacts of integral harvesting and baling trash recovery strategies and different recovery rates as well as its implications in the sugarcane production, transport and processing stages. Trash recovery using baling system presents higher costs per unit of mass of recovered trash in comparison to system in which trash is harvested and transported with sugarcane stalks (integral harvesting system). However, the integrated agricultural and industrial assessment showed that recovering trash using baling system presents better economic results (higher internal rate of return and lower ethanol production cost) than the integral harvesting system for trash recovery rates higher than 30 %. Varying trash recovery fraction, stalks productivity and mean transport distance for both integral harvesting and baling systems, sensitivity analyses showed that higher trash recovery fractions associated with higher stalks yields and long transport distances favors baling system, mainly due to the reduction of bulk load density for integral harvesting system under those conditions.