CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Sugarcane bagasse is a waste generated during sugar and alcohol production and is usually burnedin sugar mills to produce energy. Nowadays, there is increasing interest in the valorization of agro-industrial waste, for example, through its conversion into environmentally-friendly bio-basedmaterials. Bagasse fibers may be a good alternative to synthetic fibers (i.e. glass fibers, carbon)because of their good mechanical properties, availability and degradability. Biopolyethylene(bioPE) can also be obtained from sugarcane. Therefore, a bio-composite produced with sugarcanefibers as reinforcement for bioPE matrices could represent important advantages in terms ofeconomic and environmental impacts. Bagasse fibers can be obtained by different processes, butthe usual form involves alkaline pulping. A hot water treatment can be previously applied if thematerial is intended to be fractionated in its chemical components in the frame of a biorefinery.This study aims to evaluate the life cycle environmental implications of using fiber-reinforced bio-composites as filaments for 3D printing, compared with sugarcane- and petroleum-based PEfilaments. For this, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is used to evaluate three 3D printedmaterials with three different filaments. LCA allows the evaluation of the benefits of improving theproduction of 3D printed biomaterials by replacing part of the sugarcane bioPE with bagassefibers. The functional unit was the production of a 3D printed object using different filaments.Primary data were collected from laboratory tests designed to obtain pulp fibers and mix themwith sugarcane bioPE. Two processes were studied to obtain fibers from bagasse (hot water-alkaliand only alkaline processes). Secondary sources were used to obtain the data related to theproduction of sugarcane bioPE and petroleum PE. Background processes (e.g. energy production,transportation, waste treatment) were modelled using Ecoinvent v3.3 database. For the impactassessment evaluation, ReCiPe 2016 midpoint method is used. The preliminary results from theLCA show environmental improvements when reducing the amount of bioPE by replacing it withbagasse fibers in the categories of global warming, ozone formation, terrestrial acidification andfossil resource scarcity. In contrast, results also indicate that there could be higher impacts interms of stratospheric ozone, freshwater eutrophication, freshwater and marine ecotoxicity, andland use.