From manual to mechanical harvesting: reducing environmental impacts and increasing cogeneration potential

The pre-harvest burning of sugarcane leaves is a common practice that enables manual pickers to collect the crop quickly, suffering less personal injury. The burning process, however, has negative impacts on the environment, on human health and on the potential energy value of the plant.

This Brief uses the example of Brazil to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of switching from manual to mechanised sugarcane harvesting, and shares Brazil’s efforts to gradually phase-out manual harvesting and improve infrastructure to take advantage of cogeneration potential.

Key Lessons:

• mechanisation of sugarcane harvesting can increase productivity and income generation
• eradicating pre-harvest burning can reduce environmental harm and increase energy cogeneration potential
• the cogeneration of electricity from sugarcane biomass has been shown to be more efficient when using high pressure boilers