Análise do ciclo de vida do etanol produzido em uma destilaria autônoma

Abstract

The resulting climate changes which have accompanied, since the beginning, the development of the global industrial sector, confirm the need to search for alternatives that mitigate the environmental impact. Currently, among all the environmental categories that demand a concern, one of the main ones is the emission of pollutants in the air, which, year after year, influences global warming and, consequently, life on the planet, which may bring irreversible impacts in the long term. In Brazil, the cane and alcohol sector have a fundamental role in the country's gross domestic production, being the largest producer of sugar cane in the world and the second largest in ethanol. The work aimed to evaluate the impact of the ethanol life cycle on the stages of cultivation, harvest, transport and manufacture of the product in an autonomous distillery, prioritizing the impacts resulting from the release of polluting gases into the air. From that, it was calculated with the support of the literature and with the data provided by Pentagro Soluções Tecnológicas, as impact assessments of the life cycle of ethanol, comparing the stages with each other and then cox mparing the current scenario of manufacturing with alternative scenarios for this step. With the results obtained, the stages were evaluated in two stages: considering only one category of global warming, the main focus of the work, and considering several other categories such as acidification, nutrient enrichment, human and water toxicity, among others. The aim was to demonstrate how much each stage of the life cycle influenced the total value of the environmental impact in the context of global warming and how various possibilities of categorization in the analysis of a product's life cycle and how ethanol behaved. Finally, based on the comparison between the scenarios for the manufacturing stage with a focus on global warming, there are potential possibilities to reduce the impact of carbon dioxide with alternatives that are considered promising for the sector and that should be studied further and included in all aspects of the reality of each distillery to define its cost benefit, demonstrating that the theme of life cycle analysis should be considered a factor for decision making in relation to a specific product.