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Economics of Phytoremediation
The perspective of bioenergy crop cultivation has to fulfill the following
requirements (Von Cossel et al., 2019):
• providing a beneficial social and ecological contribution in increasing of agro‐ecological biodiversity and landscape aesthetics;
• ensuring cultivation on marginal agricultural land or slightly contaminated land which allow to avoid competition with food crop
production; bioenergy crops have to be able to cope with the given
biophysical constraints on marginal agricultural lands;
• resilience of bioenergy cropping systems toward the growing climate change effect;
• fostering rural development and supporting the vast number of
small‐scale family farmers, managing some 80% of the global agricultural land and natural resources.
The production costs and labor requirement of Miscanthus cultivation and
processing to bioproducts: animal bedding, combustion, and biogas were
assessed recently (Winkler et al., 2020). The approach based on summarizing
of the best practices of Miscanthus cultivation during multiyear production,
including first year establishment phase, and harvest phase starting from the
2nd year till 20th year. The cultivation cost assessment with conversion to
selected bioproducts is presented in Tables 9.1–9.3. The biggest investment is
at the first year of plantation establishing from which the largest investment
is for purchasing of rhizomes and labor cost. Another important cost driver
is the field-to-farm distance. It was concluded (Winkler et al., 2020) that the
implementation of Miscanthus into farming systems can be profitable in the
following cases: (i) for lands with unfavorable conditions, such as awkward
shapes, slopes, or low soil quality; (ii) for greening areas or soil protection corridor; (iii) when Miscanthus is directly used in own farm. Also profitable is to
cultivate Miscanthus in smaller plantation up to 1 ha, and to utilize biomass
for combustion, animal bedding, and anaerobic digestion, and from these
three pathways production of animal bedding defined as the most reasonable
(Winkler et al., 2020).
Miscanthus has a potential to play an important role to provide sustainably produced feedstock for the biogas sector (in short-term) and bioeconomy
(in long-term) (Kiesel, 2020). It will assist to achieve net zero GHG emissions,
since it can provide sustainably produced feedstock and a renewable carbon
source for the chemical industry, which requires carbon for varieties of products. Miscanthus is suitable for biogas production, being more environmental
in comparison with annual crops, may assist to decrease the environmental
impact of the biogas sector. A market pull for Miscanthus biomass while utilized for biogas production may stimulate further investments into this crop.
Development of integrated on-farm biorefineries for Miscanthus feedstock