Circular Economy (CE) aims to redress the negative impacts on the environment of linear economic models. Most CE research focusses primarily on materials flows in a stationary state. This paper’s aim is to provide a dynamic approach to CE on the regional level through the transformation of residual biomass to energy, using data from monthly crop production in Mexico. The data was analysed on a three-step approach: (1) Through time to obtain the biomass availability; (2) The selection of processing sites s based on geographical location; and (3) The processing capacity, which was calculated through a quasi-steady state on the warehouses. in the different locations. The residual biomass used ranged between 1. 9 × 106 Mg/year to 11. 5 Mg/year. The cumulative residual biomass used is 12. 1 × 106 Mg/year with a total raw material cost of 386 × 106 US /year. The results show that there is variability of the residual biomass availability throughout the year. The combination of residual biomass from different crops provides a higher throughput on the processing site, especially with yearly variations. The results show that the transformation to liquids is more profitable when processing 200, 000 Mg/year or more, otherwise it is more profitable to transform it to electricity. The results of this research model a systematic and quantitative method for using agricultural residual biomass to generate energy or chemicals. This transformation must consider four approaches: (1) the yearly fluctuations of the crops; (2) economic issues; (3) biomass availability; and (4) biomass processing sites’ location. Residual biomass transformation to energy has a great possibility to contribute to CE on the regional level.
Lozano et al. (Wed,) studied this question.