Matsueda, Yu, and Antunes, Elsa (2024) A review of current technologies for the sustainable valorisation of sugarcane bagasse. Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, 12. 114900.

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Abstract

The Australian sugar industry over the last few years has focused heavily on the valorisation of sugarcane bagasse, an abundant lignocellulosic biomass that has the potential to be converted into many valuable chemicals and materials. Despite this, it is currently an under-utilised material that is often burnt inefficiently as a means of disposal. As such, researchers are greatly committed to finding new methods of converting bagasse into higher-value products. These methods include a variety of thermal and biological processes as well as the conversion of bagasse into other biobased materials. However, due to the vast number of applications of sugarcane bagasse, optimal utilisation in terms of economic and environmental sustainability is a major challenge. Therefore, this article provides an overview on the recent advancements in the valorisation of sugarcane bagasse while comparing the feasibility of each process for the Australian sugar industry. For biological processes, high pre-treatment costs and long processing times make them economically unviable, while the production of biobased materials require large volumes of water and produce toxic wastes, making them difficult to integrate into sugar mills. For thermal processes, pyrolysis was determined to be a suitable valorisation method due to its fast-processing times, low water usage and the promising applications available for the resulting biochar and bio-oil, which include their potential as a low-cost sugar colour adsorbent and insecticide respectively.

Item ID:	85183
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2213-3437
Copyright Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Date Deposited:	22 Apr 2025 03:26
FoR Codes:	40 ENGINEERING > 4011 Environmental engineering > 401199 Environmental engineering not elsewhere classified @ 70% 40 ENGINEERING > 4016 Materials engineering > 401610 Timber, pulp and paper @ 30%
SEO Codes:	24 MANUFACTURING > 2406 Environmentally sustainable manufacturing activities > 240699 Environmentally sustainable manufacturing activities not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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