Straw Turned into Fuel, Demand Exceeds Supply: Manufacturers Compete to Buy

"We just started production, and orders are already booked out 3 years ahead. We have no worries about selling!" At the straw collection and processing base in Gaofeng Village, Shanpo Street, Jiangxia District, Wuhan, general manager Huang Xiexing rattled off to reporters, "Not only can rice, cotton, rapeseed and vegetable straw be turned into fuel, but also fir branches and leaves, peanut stems, lotus seed pod shells, and more can all be turned from waste into treasure."

Huang Xiexing explained that in Shanpo Street, every household grows fir trees. To promote fir tree growth, branches must be pruned by hand. Hubei prohibits open burning of straw, and the large amount of agricultural and forestry waste every year gives villagers a headache. "Throw it away and there is garbage everywhere; burn it and it pollutes the air."

In October last year, 8 farming households in Gaofeng Village had a "flash of inspiration." With the support of a biomass fuel company, they pooled 3 million yuan and established a professional cooperative, adopting a "company + cooperative + base + farming households" operating model. Using a piece of abandoned factory land, plus 13 mu of transferred land, they built this biomass briquette fuel production line base, turning waste into fuel and selling it to boiler plants, cement plants and other places to replace fossil energy.

In the base's production workshop, workers on 3 briquette fuel production lines process straw, agricultural and forestry branches and stalks, soybean stems, combustible melon and fruit shells and more purchased from the village and surrounding villages through a series of steps including peeling, crushing, extrusion and drying into pellet fuel, which is bagged and ready for transport.

Yu Liangzhong, village Party secretary of Gaofeng Village, is one of the 8 farmer shareholders. He explained that Shanpo Street is located in a typical agricultural and forestry area, and the village and its surrounding areas are rich in agricultural and forestry resources. It can digest the agricultural and forestry waste from nearly 10 nearby villages, and these raw materials are all "bought with money: fir branches are 150 yuan per ton, sawdust is 200 yuan per ton, and straw is about 140 yuan per ton."

Huang Xiexing said that the base collects and digests about 11,000 tons of crop straw, agricultural and forestry product processing waste and more each year, producing about 10,000 tons of biomass briquette pellet fuel, equivalent to replacing 6,000 tons of standard coal, while also creating 15 local jobs for farmers.

"We sent trial production products to several industrial and civil boiler plants in Wuhan, Xianning and other places for trial burning. The calorific value was sufficient, and the exhaust gas produced by combustion was very low," Huang Xiexing said.

In the Jianghan Plain, the problem of straw and other agricultural and forestry waste has long troubled the government and farmers. According to staff from the Wuhan rural work special task force, these farmer-initiated cooperatives that turn waste into treasure will find a way out for the city's ban on open burning of crop straw, while also promoting the construction of beautiful villages.