Indexado en

Licencia y uso

Citaciones

Cited 6 times in

Altmetrics

Grant support

This study was part of the Mobile Flip project, which is financed by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 637020-MOBILE FLIP, the BioHub project, which is financed by the Botnia-Atlantica program, a part of the European regional development fund and by a project granted by Xunta de Galicia, Spain (project ref. ED431F 2016/001). Dr. S. Gonzalez-Garcia would like to express her gratitude to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for financial support (Grant reference RYC-2014-14984). Dr. S. Gonzalez-Garcia belongs to the Galician Competitive Research Group GRC2013-032 and to the CRETUS Strategic Partnership (AGRUP2015/02), both co-funded by Xunta de Galicia (Spain) and FEDER (UE). The authors would also like to thank Tomas Nordfjell and Dimitris Athanassiadis for their constructive comments that helped to improve the quality of this study.

Análisis de autorías institucional

Compartir

Life cycle assessment of decentralized mobile production systems for pelletizing logging residues under Nordic conditions

Publicado en:Journal Of Cleaner Production. 201 830-841 - 2018-01-01 201(), DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.08.030

Autores: de la Fuente, Teresa; Bergstrom, Dan; Gonzalez-Garcia, Sara; Larsson, Sylvia H.;

Afiliaciones

Resumen

The development of mobile systems for the decentralized pelletizing of forest-based residual biomass is currently underway. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the environmental impacts of such systems that needs to be developed for correct judgements on the most sustainable developing paths. The objective of this study was to quantify and compare the environmental impacts of a decentralized mobile production system for pelletizing logging residues in Northern Sweden operating at either the forest landing or forest terminal from a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) perspective. The results showed that the landing- and terminal-based scenarios showed similar environmental profiles. The pelleting, transportation and drying stages of both scenarios were identified as environmental hotspots. These production stages accounted for 62%, 14% and 14% of the total greenhouse gas emissions, respectively. Key factors influencing the system were the use of electricity at terminals, the increase in pelletizer capacity, and long transportation distances. The use of a Swedish electricity mix instead of diesel based electricity in the terminal-based scenario reduced all of the environmental impacts by between 68% and 83%, with the exception of fresh water eutrophication potential, which increased by 26%. In conclusion, our findings indicate that an electrified mobile pellet production system with high operational efficiency and situated at a terminal close to the harvesting sites could, from an LCA point of view, be an interesting option for pelletizing Nordic logging residues, especially in regions with long transportation distances to industry. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Palabras clave