Brazil forest utilization

Both in the USA and the EU, the introduction of renewable fuels standards is likely to increase considerably the consumption of bioethanol. Lignocelluloses from agricultural and forest industry residues and/or the carbohydrate fraction of municipal solid waste (MSW) will be the future source of biomass, but starch-rich sources such as corn grain (the major raw material for ethanol in USA) and sugar cane (in Brazil) are currently used. Although land devoted to fuel could reduce land available for food production, this is at present not a serious problem, but could become progressively more important with increasing use of bioethanol. For this reason, it is important to utilize other crops that could be cultivated in unused land (an important social factor to preserve rural populations) and, especially, start to use cellulose-based feedstocks and waste materials as raw material. 

Pulpwood also is plentiful in such countries as Canada and the Russia and abundant tropical forests exist in such countries as Brazil. Adequate wood supplies exist in Scandanavia as well. Silvicultural practices in the Scandanavian region, coupled with intensive utilization of harvested materials, have prevented undue scarcity in that geographic area. 

Trocino s concept of total utilization of the raw material, Douglas-fir bark, to produce several salable products was good, and earned Bohemia the 1976 Environmental Award from the American Paper Institute and the American Forest Products Institute. Unfortunately a certain amount of solvent losses is inevitable. Thus, efficient solvent extraction and recovery of solvent to obtain the primary product in a 3% yield, based on bark, could only be expected to be cost effective if the product sold in the dollars per kilogram range, such as carnauba wax imported from Brazil or Mexico. Unrefined Douglas-fir wax is soft because of the presence of terpenes, unsaturated fats, etc., and is subject to discolorization by iron salts because of the presence of ferulate esters, which promote the formation of complexes. As in the case of the polyphenolic extractives from redwood and hemlock bark, the product end-use was not sufficiently unique to ultimately justify a price that would support production and operating costs, and generate a reasonable profit. 

Proposals to implement a biorefinery approach for platform chemical production have ignited a debate on whether biorefinery feedstock production threatens food security and increases the rate of deforestation (Ravindranath et al., 2008). It s worrying because the feedstock suitable for biorefinery implementation is procured primarily from forests. Any activity such as feedstock production, which puts considerable pressure on the forest cover, endangers natural heritage and biodiversity (Achten et al., 2013). This chapter discusses various forest-based feedstocks for biorefinery. Moreover, it seeks to elaborate the industrial applications of this feedstock, their characteristics and land requirements (essentially the extent of theoretical deforestation), their production, and procurement. Clearly the influence of biorefinery on woodlands will rely on the nature of the feedstock being used. For example, Brazil utilizes deforested land for sugarcane cultivation and subsequent ethanol production. However, in the case of Indonesia, rain forests were cleared for palm oil production. All of the biorefinery processes require cellulose as the raw material, and since the major source of cellulose in nature is in the form of trees, large-scale deforestation seems to be a plausible end scenario (Gao et al., 2011). 

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