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Dynamics of societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructures and their spatial patterns drive surging resource use and emissions. Building up and maintaining stocks requires large amounts of resources; currently stock-building materials amount to almost 60% of all materials used by humanity. Buildings, infrastructures and machinery shape social practices of production and consumption, thereby creating path dependencies for future resource use. They constitute the physical basis of the spatial organization of most socio-economic activities, for example as mobility networks, urbanization and settlement patterns and various other infrastructures. This dataset features a detailed map of material stocks for the whole of Germany on a 10m grid based on high resolution Earth Observation data (Sentinel-1 + Sentinel-2), crowd-sourced geodata (OSM) and material intensity factors. Temporal extent The map is representative for ca. 2018. Data format Per federal state, the data come in tiles of 30x30km (see shapefile). The projection is EPSG:3035. The images are compressed GeoTiff files (*.tif). There is a mosaic in GDAL Virtual format (*.vrt), which can readily be opened in most Geographic Information Systems. The dataset features area and mass for different street types area and mass for different rail types area and mass for other infrastructure area, volume and mass for different building types Masses are reported as total values, and per material category. Units area in m² height in m volume in m³ mass in t for infrastructure and buildings Further information For further information, please see the publication or contact Helmut Haberl (helmut.haberl@boku.ac.at). A web-visualization of this dataset is available here. Visit our website to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS - Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society. Publication Haberl, H., Wiedenhofer, D., Schug, F., Frantz, D., Virág, D., Plutzar, C., Gruhler, K., Lederer, J., Schiller, G. , Fishman, T., Lanau, M., Gattringer, A., Kemper, T., Liu, G., Tanikawa, H., van der Linden, S., Hostert, P. (accepted): High-resolution maps of material stocks in buildings and infrastructures in Austria and Germany. Environmental Science & Technology Funding This research was primarly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950). ML and GL acknowledge funding by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (CityWeight, 6111-00555B), ML thanks the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; project Multi-Scale, Circular Economic Potential of Non-Residential Building Scale, EP/S029273/1), JL acknowledges funding by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), project ESR17-067, TF acknowledges the Israel Science Foundation grant no. 2706/19.

Bioenergy villages can be defined as villages, municipalities, settlements or communities, which produce and use most of their energy from local bioenergy and other renewable energy sources. A bioenergy village approach has not been applied in Macedonia yet, and it is at a nascent stage of implementation in other South-Eastern European countries. This work aims to integrate a techno-economic, social and environmental assessment and an implementation strategy into a bioenergy village concept, which is not often seen in works dedicated to bioenergy villages and biomass based heating systems. The assessment was conducted by means of energy audit and project-related tools, whilst the strategy was composed by bioenergy working group meetings. Results show that a biomass based district heating system is a more attractive solution for heating several public buildings instead of a fossil fuelled system, with numerous associated benefits. Such concepts can be replicated with variety of renewables, thus contributing to sustainable development pathways of small communities.

This study aims to characterize and valorize hemp residual biomass by a slow pyrolysis process. The volatile by-products of hemp carbonization were characterized by several methods (TGA, UV-VIS, TLC, Flash Prep-LC, UHPLC, QTOF-MS) to understand the pyrolysis reaction mechanisms and to identify the chemical products produced during the process. The obtained carbon yield was 29%, generating a gaseous stream composed of phenols and furans which was collected in four temperature ranges (F1 at 20–150 °C, F2 at 150–250 °C, F3 at 250–400 °C and F4 at 400–1000 °C). The obtained liquid fractions were separated into subfractions by flash chromatography. The total phenolic content (TPC) varied depending on the fraction but did not correlate with an increase in temperature or with a decrease in pH value. Compounds present in fractions F1, F3 and F4, being mainly phenolic molecules such as guaiacyl or syringyl derivatives issued from the lignin degradation, exhibit antioxidant capacity. The temperature of the pyrolysis process was positively correlated with detectable phenolic content, which can be explained by the decomposition order of the hemp chemical constituents. A detailed understanding of the chemical composition of pyrolysis products of hemp residuals allows for an assessment of their potential valorization routes and the future economic potential of underutilized biomass.

AbstractAlthough the role of livestock in future food systems is debated, animal proteins are unlikely to completely disappear from our diet. Grasslands are a key source of primary productivity for livestock, and feed‐food competition is often limited on such land. Previous research on the potential for sustainable grazing has focused on restricted geographical areas or does not consider inter‐annual changes in grazing opportunities. Here, we developed a robust method to estimate trends and interannual variability (IV) in global livestock carrying capacity (number of grazing animals a piece of land can support) over 2001–2015, as well as relative stocking density (the reported livestock distribution relative to the estimated carrying capacity [CC]) in 2010. We first estimated the aboveground biomass that is available for grazers on global grasslands based on the MODIS Net Primary Production product. This was then used to calculate livestock carrying capacities using slopes, forest cover, and animal forage requirements as restrictions. We found that globally, CC decreased on 27% of total grasslands area, mostly in Europe and southeastern Brazil, while it increased on 15% of grasslands, particularly in Sudano‐Sahel and some parts of South America. In 2010, livestock forage requirements exceeded forage availability in northwestern Europe, and southern and eastern Asia. Although our findings imply some opportunities to increase grazing pressures in cold regions, Central Africa, and Australia, the high IV or low biomass supply might prevent considerable increases in stocking densities. The approach and derived open access data sets can feed into global food system modelling, support conservation efforts to reduce land degradation associated with overgrazing, and help identify undergrazed areas for targeted sustainable intensification efforts or rewilding purposes.

Lignocellulosic biomass is a sustainable source of renewable substrate to produce low carbon footprint energy and materials. Biomass conversion is usually performed in two steps: a biomass pretreatment for improving cellulose accessibility followed by enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose. In this study we investigated the efficiency of a bioextrusion pretreatment (extrusion in the presence of cellulase enzyme) for production of reducing sugars from corn crop agricultural residues. Our results demonstrate that bioextrusion increased the reducing sugar conversion yield by at least 94% at high solid/liquid ratio (14%-40%). Monitoring biomass surface with carbohydrate-binding modules (FTCM-depletion assay) revealed that well known negative impact of high solid/liquid ratio on conversion yield is not due to the lack of exposed cellulose which was abundant under such conditions. Bioextrusion was found to be less efficient on alkaline pretreated biomass but being a mild and solvent limiting pretreatment, it might help to minimize the waste stream.

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a crucial role in making cities smarter, more accessible and more open. In this paper we present a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm addressing the challenges that need to be overcome when creating smarter cities. This architecture takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utilities as well as of the infrastructure belonging to the city municipalities to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution, which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Moreover, the paper describes a real-world prototype, that instantiates the aforementioned architecture, deployed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. This prototype is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture.

Fast Pyrolysis Bio Oil (FPBO) can be produced from a variety of lignocellulosic biomass materials. In this report the results are presented concerning the production of FPBO from the biomass feedstocks selected in the SmartCHP project. The FPBOs are used within the project for further development work of the SmartCHP system. Detailed analysis results for the FPBOs are reported in deliverables 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8. Important properties such as heating value and moisture content are included in this report as well to derive mass, energy and carbon balances and ensure this report can be read without consulting the other (non-public) reports. The biomass selection is based on availability, suitability and sustainability and is reported in detail in deliverable 2.2. Five scenarios are made covering four different biomass materials and one import scenario: Agricultural residues – corn stover - Romania Organic waste – olive kernel - Greece Woody biomass – forest residue – Sweden FPBO import scenario – Sweden to the Netherlands Dedicated bioenergy crop – miscanthus - Croatia Conform the grant agreement, three biomass materials were selected and supplied by Capax for conversion to FPBO in BTGs bench-scale pyrolysis plant. For the fourth material (miscanthus) previous tests have been performed at BTG and sufficient information is already available as input for the scenario studies. FPBO produced from miscanthus is also available for testing. The results from the experimental work showed that each of the materials could be processed in the bench-scale pyrolysis plant without operational problems. The FPBO production results show that the wood residues generate the highest FPBO yield (68 wt.%) followed by corn stover (56% wt.%) and olive kernels (49 wt.%). The FPBO derived from wood residues was a single-phase homogeneous liquid. Both corn stover and olive kernel derived FPBO consisted of an aqueous phase and an organic phase which needed to be conditioned (partial water removal) to generate a homogeneous liquid.