Refining Biomass Residues for Sustainable Energy and Bioproducts

Technology, Advances, Life Cycle Assessment, and Economics

R. Praveen Kumar, Edgard Gnansounou, Jegannathan Kenthorai Raman, Baskar Gurunathan, Gurunathan Baskar

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780128189962
• eBook ISBN: 9780128189979
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Energy

The utilization of various types of biomass residue to produce products such as biofuels and biochemicals means biorefinery technology using biomass residues may become a one-stop solution to the increasing need for sustainable, non-fossil sources of energy and chemicals.Refining Biomass Residues for Sustainable Energy and Bioproducts: Technology, Advances, Life Cycle Assessment and Economics focuses on the various biorefineries currently available and discusses their uses, challenges, and future developments. This book introduces the concept of integrated biorefinery systems, as well as their operation and feedstock sourcing. It explores the specificities, current developments, and potential end products of various types of residue, from industrial and municipal to agricultural and marine, as well as residue from food industries. Sustainability issues are discussed at length, including life cycle assessment, economics, and cost analysis of different biorefinery models. In addition, a number of global case studies examine successful experiences in different regions.This book is an ideal resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of bioenergy and waste management who are looking to learn about technologies involved in residue biorefinery systems, how to reduce their environmental impacts, and how to ensure their commercial viability.- Explores a range of different biorefinery categories, such as industrial, agricultural, and marine biomass residues- Includes a Life Cycle Assessment of biorefinery models, in addition to costs and market analysis.- Features case studies from around the world and is written by an international team of authors

Part I

Concept of integrated biorefinery systems for waste management

Outline

• 1 Solid waste biorefineries

1

Solid waste biorefineries

A. Saravanan¹, R.V. Hemavathy¹, T.R. Sundararaman¹, S. Jeevanantham¹, P. Senthil Kumar² and P.R. Yaashikaa², ¹Department of Biotechnology, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai, India, ²Department of Chemical Engineering, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India

Abstract

Solid waste (SW) management is a term that is used to refer to the process of collecting and treating SWs. SWs are characterized as waste, got from residential, industrial, mining, or rural exercises. SW comprises product packaging, grass clippings, furniture, dress, bottles, sustenance scraps, daily papers, machines, and batteries. A portion of the things in SW is reused wherever prudent as well as down to earth. The way to proficient waste administration is to guarantee appropriate isolation of waste at source and to guarantee that the waste experiences various floods of reusing and resource recuperation. At that point, decreased last buildup is then stored deductively in sterile landfills. Landfill and pyrolysis are the two noteworthy strategies for the transfer of SWs. Pyrolysis seems, by all accounts, to be a promising technique to deal with SWs since high-esteem items, for example, bio-oil, biochar, and gas, can be obtained from the process. In pyrolysis the waste materials are exposed to high temperature in the nonavailability of oxygen. Contingent upon process parameters and waste sort, synthetic concoctions of the product and additional energy can be obtained from the waste. This part analyzes the distinctive sorts of SW, their sources, availabilities, and synthetic organizations and in addition the points of interest of pyrolysis process and their items.

Keywords

Biorefinery; solid waste; landfill; pyrolysis; flocculation; biomass conversion; biofuel

1.1 Introduction

Solid waste (SW) increasing from different sectors is a serious problem in the urban areas of the world. Population growth and industrial wastes are the major sources for the generation of enormous SW; it poses a serious threat to human health and environmental quality (Al-Salem, 2019). SW management all over the world is looked as a real test to common bodies. Municipal solid waste (MSW) includes commercial and domestic wastes generated in municipal or notified areas in either solid or semisolid form, excluding industrial hazardous wastes but including treated biomedical wastes (Anthraper et al., 2018). Conversion of SW is a stinging and expansive issue in both urban and rural zones in many developed and developing countries. Among every single living being on Earth, human beings are the main species that damage nature so drastically. As in 2014 European families disposed household waste of more than 200 million tons (Eurostat, 2017; Hietala et al., 2018). The SW is spread in a wide area of land, which, therefore, causes severe contamination. Regardless of having lower waste generation by India than developed nations, the image of waste management in a large portion of the Indian towns, urban areas so far shows colossal scope for development (Martínez et al., 2013; Soni et al., 2016).

Plastic waste directly and indirectly affects living organisms throughout the ecosystem, including an increasingly high impact on marine life at a macro and microscale. Wood waste comes mainly from industry, construction and demolition, as well as packaging. According to the quality grade, wood waste is recycled; incinerated, with energy recovery; or treated at special facilities. Treated wood is hard to discard utilizing landfill or exchange strategies since substantial components can drain into the encompassing condition. Due to large amount of embodied energy, rubber tires take a long period of time for degrading; tires also contain heavy metals that can leach into the environment, and they can burst into flames, which are hard to douse, and discharge lethal materials (Wang et al., 2017). The untreated organic wastes can generate methane emissions that leach into ground water, which may cause risk to human health by spreading diseases. Even the nappies cause diseases to the humans when they can wrapped in plastic. Once they are disposed in the environment, due to the wrapped plastic, the degradation of them is postponed, which spreads diseases. Methane and other greenhouse gases are produced when a lot of space in landfills is occupied by the nonrecyclable cardboards such as pizza boxes and disposable coffee cups and other wastages. Apart from MSWs, there are some other SWs such as agriculture and forestry residues; animal manure and sewage sludge should be pretreated and then disposed into the environment once they become nontoxic to environmental ecosystems.

There are several waste-management techniques that are commonly used to treat the wastes and convert them into nontoxic or beneficial form such as landfilling, biological, and thermal processing of wastes. Landfilling techniques are most efficient for MSWs. This method is more expensive due to site cost and lack of accommodation of the large volume of waste being produced. Once waste is landfilled, the possibility for the recovery of resources from those landfilled area is less, and those wastes release toxins, leachates, and greenhouse gases. These released products can associate with landfilling and decrease the efficiency of wastes degradation. In biological processing the wastes can be processed by the microorganisms either aerobically or anaerobically. For the biological processing of any type of SWs requires large area for the degradation of the organic wastes, and the time consumed for this process is high, and the process is more expensive. Some materials should be pretreated before being allowed to the biological treatment, especially plastics and other SWs require pretreatments before their biological degradation (Eckenfelder and O’Connor, 2013). Thermal processing is a process in which the waste materials are degraded by carried out the process or applying higher temperature. Thermal processing includes several techniques such as incineration, gasification, and pyrolysis. These processes have more advantages than others, but finally it results in production of huge amount of greenhouse gases and carcinogenic volatile organics. For the thermal processing of SWs, it requires drying as pretreatment, which is high energy–requiring process and expensive (Lu et al., 2011). Hydrothermal wet oxidation is another technique used for the treatment of hazardous SWs. In this process the wastes are degraded in water under specific conditions: temperature ranges from 150°C to 320°C, and pressure is 20–150 bar (Munir et al., 2017; Anthraper et al., 2018).

This chapter mainly focused on the biorefineries of SWs from different origins. It describes the sources of SWs such as agricultural and forestry residues, MSWs and their properties, animal manure, and sewage sludge; their biomass pretreatments also explained in detail. The different techniques used for the degradation of SWs, such as landfills, biological processing, thermal processing, are explained. Especially the methods of pyrolysis, characteristics, and their features are explained in detail for thermal processing of SWs. Several liquid products and their physicochemical properties, chemical composition, and phases are discussed, and some other refinery products and their future trends are also explained in this chapter.

1.2 Solid wastes

SW: The useless and unwanted products in the solid state derived from the activities of and discarded by society. It is produced either as by-product of production processes or arises from the domestic or commercial sector when objects or materials are discarded after use. SWs can be classified into seven different classes are showed in Fig. 1.1 (Muldowney et al., 2013). SW management reduces or eliminates the adverse impact on the environment and human health. A number of processes are involved...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Concept of integrated biorefinery systems for waste management
• Part II: Sources and operation of waste biorefineries
• Part III: Industrial waste biorefineries
• Part IV: Agroindustry waste biorefineries
• Part V: Food industry waste biorefineries
• Part VI: Marine waste biorefineries
• Part VII: Life cycle assessment of waste biorefinery models
• Part VIII: Economics and cost analysis of waste biorefineries
• Index