Análise de inventário de ciclo de vida de veículos utilizados na colheita e no transporte de cana-de-açúcar para a produção de etanol

Abstract

The development of worldwide ethanol production from sugarcane showed the necessity of an emission inventory to enable the analysis of the real impact of every single process stage (FINGER & MATOS, 2015). However, in Brazil, there are few published articles with emissions information of the process; mainly in the logistics of sugarcane to the mill. For these reasons, the study of car emissions inventories was developed from a bibliographical survey in order to be added to the ecoinvent® database platform. The data collected include emissions from vehicular operation in the Southeast region of Brazil resulting from the use of four types of vehicles: harvester, transhipment tractor, truck and “treminhão”. In consonance with the ecoinvent® model, waste, environment emission and technosphere were quantified. In the case of heavy trucks, the residual values were calculated by mathematical relationships involving the loading factor; The emissions were determined from the emission factors of the output elements; while the technosphere values resulted from relations with the life factor and load of each vehicle. For the inventory of the harvester and the trans-shipment tractor, only a few emissions to the environment were calculated, since reports from CETESB (2015) do not include agricultural machinery, and research in the literature mainly analyzes the issue of ozone depletion by carbon dioxide. In future research, such data should be collected in the field to decrease the uncertainty of the life cycle study. When analyzing the obtained results, the discrepancy of brazilian process conditions in comparison to other regions of the globe was confirmed, which was the justification to develop the inventories. It was verified that the harvester has the greatest fuel consumption between the vehicles. However, the tractor is the vehicle with the highest amount of emissions to the environment.