Sunflower is an important crop in Parecis region of the Brazilian Cerrado. In 2014, the region produced 232.700 tons of sunflower grains, 45% ofthe national production. Sunflower production comes mostly from a system that has soybean as the main crop. The association of soybean and sunflower can reduce environmental impacts due to shared use of resources. This study performed a "cradle to gate" Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the soybean-sunflower production system used in Parecis region and compared its environmental profile to that of the monoculture of these two crops. We evaluated the impacts related to the use of soil (land use change emissions and liming) for each crop according to three allocation criteria: time of soil occupation, yield and gross margin. Although performance on "Climate Change" and some other impact categories had varied according to the allocation criteria used, the soybean-sunflower rotation crop system presented lower environmental impacts on every category when compared to soybean and sunflower monocultures with the same yield. Important impact reductionswere observed on "Climate change" (43%), "Terrestrial acidification" (26%) and "Particulate matter formation" (20%) categories.
Corn is one of the possibilities for diversification of Brazilian ethanol production. Four scenarios of analysis were established. The environmental dimension was evaluated by the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, whereas the Thermodynamic performance was verified by applying the techniques of Cumulative Energy Demand (CED) and Cumulative Exergy Demand (CExD). The production of ethanol from corn using wood chips for energy supply of the plant resulted in a homogeneous environmental performance. Factors such direct seeding -and the LHV of the wood for energy support this result. For both Thermodynamic analysis the production of sugarcane ethanol had better indexes because the use of bagasse replaced other sources of primary energy. This result remained for a combined analysis between the two dimensions, which related environmental effects in terms of Climate Change with the aggregation of primary energy consumption for ideal systems.
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