Agricultural crop residues

Agricultural crop residues are a valuable renewable biomass resource. In 1999, American farmers harvested 53,909,000 acres of wheat (1). The straw from this acreage of wheat represents >50 million t annually. Currently, some of the straw is harvested (baled) for use as livestock bedding or low-grade animal feed. However, these low-value uses provide only a... 

Availability as such is a difficult subject to evaluate for agricultural crop residues. The answer to the simple question of whether the crop residues are... 

The principal sources of biomass used for energy purposes are wood, gathered from forests, orchards and farms, agricultural crop residues and animal wastes. Human wastes can also be potentially... 

Agriculture crop residues Agriculture crop residues include biomass (primarily stalks and leaves) that are not harvested or removed from the fields in... 

In recent years, considerable research has been done on the isolation of nanofibres from plants to use them as fillers in biocomposites [86-90]. Agricultural crop residues are one of the most valuable sources of natural cellulose nanofihres. It should be noted that in agricultural fibres, the cellulose microfibrils are less tightly wound in the primary ceU wall than in the secondary wall in wood, thus fibrillation... 

Carhon in the environment is sequestered by plants/biomass in a 1-10 year time frame by photosynthesis using sunlight as the energy source - one year if agricultural crops are used and 10+ years for tree plantations. This is in balance with the rate and timescale of use of the plant/biomass resources to make chemicals and products, and ultimate disposal with release of carbon back to the environment. In contrast, the rate and timescale of carhon sequestration to fossil resources (oil, coal, natural gas) is millions of years, whereas the use and ultimate disposal is in the 1-10 year time frame. This makes the use of fossil carbon resources out of balance and unsustainable. This represents the fundamental, intrinsic value proposition for using biobased carbon from plant/biomass, agricultural crops/residues and algae as opposed to fossil carbon resources. 

Basically, the cellulose is the most widely distributed skeletal polysaccharide and represents about 50% of the cell wall material of plants. Beside hemicellulose and lignin, cellulose is a major component of agricultural wastes and municipal residues [123-125], The cellulose and hemicellulose comprise the major part of all green plants and this is the main reason for using such terms as cellulosic wastes or simply cellulosic s for those materials which are produced especially as agricultural crop residues, fmit and vegetable wastes from industrial processing, and other solid wastes from caimed food and drinks industries [125, 126]. 

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