Background: With criticism about the economic viability and environmental performance of biofuels, the use of byproducts and integration with external industries could be achieved to improve their performance and provide further use for byproducts and wastes. Methodology: A review of potential byproduct and utility exchanges between biofuel and external industries has been documented in this article through a literature review and brainstorming workshop, and results have been classified based on their interactions. Results: It has been found that byproduct exchanges, especially those between biofuel industries, and exchanges between the biofuel industries and the food, feed, agriculture and energy industries, offer many potential exchanges. Conclusion: The identified synergies offer possibilities for potential collaboration partners in symbiotic exchanges with the biofuel industry.
The coastal zones management not only relies on a profound knowledge of the shoreline but also on a good assessment of morphodynamics, sediments transport and coastal interventions required. Many coastal studies, such as beach slope estimates, equilibrium beach profile definition or sediment transport analysis, depend on the sediment grain size at the site. This paper aims to gain a better understanding of grain size distribution along the cross-shore profile and variation of d 50 , allowing to define a representative d 50 to characterize the beaches. On the study site chosen, Barra beach, Aveiro, an extensive field campaign was performed, from October 2010 to May 2011. In a weekly basis, samples from 5 points along a cross-shore profile were collected. During this period, data related to wave climate was collected from the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute in temporal series of 10 min. Tidal projections from Hydrographic Institute were also identified for the period of the field campaigns. The sediment grain size distributions showed that, although the mass-median-diameter does not usually pass the 1 mm, d 50 presented a great variation during winter, in the intertidal zone. On the other side, the first and last points of the cross-shore profile, located far from the intertidal zone, presented the smaller d 50 and variation through time. The significant wave height presented a mean value of 2.16 m. The most energetic wave climates happened in November, January and February. During those months, an increase of d 50 in the wave breaking zone was noticed. Generally, the expected behavior of the cross-shore sediment grain size distribution is in line with the data collected in this paper and it was verified that the grain size is coarser on the intertidal zone and after storm periods. Also, despite the complexity of defining a characteristic d 50 due to its great temporal and spatial variation, sensitivity analysis on the data obtained helped the identification of the upper foreshore limit, at high tide, as the better location for a sediment sample collection representative of a cross-shore profile.
As the production of biofuels continues to expand worldwide, criticism about, e.g. the energy output versus input and the competition with food has been questioned. However, biofuels may be optimized to increase the environmental performance through the concepts of industrial symbiosis. This paper offers a quantification of the environmental performance of industrial symbiosis in the biofuel industry through integration of biogas and ethanol processes using a life cycle approach. Results show that although increasing integration is assumed to produce environmental benefits in industrial symbiosis, not all impact categories have achieved this and the results depend upon the allocation methods chosen.
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