Agrosilvopastoral waste, regarding agriculture and agro-industry sectors, is pointed as a promising sustainable raw material for biofuels production, specially concerning exploitation of lignocellulosic organic residues for fermentable sugars and cellulosic ethanol output, being therefore necessary to investigate the potential of these substrates concerning chemical composition, since many of them were not reported yet in literature. Being so, this paper presents a study of chemical composition and enzymatic hydrolysis of wastes from the four main crops in Maranhão, Brazil (soy, cassava, rice and corn) which are usually underutilized or abandoned in the field. The results of enzymatic hydrolysis were satisfactory for both soy and particularly corn residues, which presented total reducing sugars (TRS) percentage greater than 50% in comparison with pure cellulose.

The aim of the present study is to assess the potential of ethanol deriving from the mesocarp of babassu coconut to be used in fuel cells. Babassu ethanol was generated through hydrolysis and fermentation processes. The Pt, PtRh and PtRu electrodes were prepared in carbon Vulcan XC72R through the reduction method and applied as electrocatalysts in ethanol oxidation reaction. X-Ray diffraction (XRD), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX), stripping CO, cyclic voltammetry, chronoamperometry, and online differential electrochemical mass spectrometry (DEMS) were used to characterize the synthesized eletrocatalysts. The electrocatalyst Pt80Ru20/C presented larger active area and higher catalytic activity than other studied materials. The current efficiency of CO2 production rated less than 1% in all studied electrocatalysts, thus showing that babassu ethanol oxidation produces less pollutants than the commercial ethanol.