★Applied System Innovation (ISSN 2571-5577)
★Special Issue "Reuse, Recycle and Reduce: Smart Innovative Treatments of Agricultural Waste and By-Products"
★https://www.mdpi.com/journal/asi/special_issues/agricultural_waste

Dear Colleagues,

The valorization of agricultural waste and agro-industrial byproducts is attracting increasing attention, as demonstrated by the publication of several reports on quantification, using GIS tools, of their overall production along the supply chains as well as the increasingly recognized sustainable need to both avoid their disposal in landfill and find new renewable resources from their reuse. This Special Issue, as linked to the sustainability of agricultural production systems, is fundamental, since such waste is often considered useless and, as such, discarded. The accumulation of agricultural waste and byproducts can result in negative effects for human health and safety as well as for the environment. Moreover, to cosider agro-industrial byproducts like wastes produces disposal costs for the companies. If biomasses are used as input for anaerobc digestion processes they can produce income for biogas plant manager, who will sell bioenergy (i.e., biogas or biomethane) and digestate.

In this regard, sustainable management by recycling and reusing agro-industrial waste and byproducts as biomasses for anaerobic digestion (AD) to produce bioenergy is widely studied in literature because of the high saving potential of AD-based systems with respect to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, life cycle assessment (LCA) is the most recommended technique to assess the environmental and energy impacts associated with waste management and treatment and is widely used to assess environmental impacts and evaluate new smart techniques/systems for sustainable managing agro-industrial waste and byproducts, which can become a resource for agriculture in terms of improving the environmental balances related to agricultural production processes, or being used in the manufacturing of building construction materials and products, as one valid way to save natural resources and promote environmental sustainability.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collect original research articles, as well as review articles, on the most recent developments and research efforts in this field, with the purpose of providing new research directions. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

-Spatial localization and quantification of waste and byproducts for secondary raw materials production;
-GIS application for sustainable development of new systems;
-Clean and renewable energy production from wastes;
-Life cycle analysis to evaluate environmental impact of new systems for bioenergy production;
-Novel approaches to sustainable manage wastes and agro-industrial byproducts;
-Integrated approaches from anaerobic digestion and wastewater treatment;
-Sustainable reuse of agricultural wastes to reduce GHG emissions;
-Sustainable reuse of agro-industrial byproducts to reduce disposal costs;
-Estimation of willingness to pay for adopting sustainable techologies to produce energy from wastes;
-Green building materials.

Dr. Francesca Valenti
Dr. Roberta Selvaggi
Guest Editors

★When you choose ASI, you will benefit from:

- Free-publication for well-prepared manuscripts submitted before 31 December 2020;
- Owning the full copyright to your work, and your article is free to read for anyone at any time;
- A rapid publication process: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision provided to authors approximately 16.4 days after submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 3.2 days (median values for papers published in this journal in the second half of 2019).

★Submission Instructions★

To submit to the Special Issue, please click here:
http://www.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload/?journal=asi

For further details on the submission process, please see the instructions for authors at the journal website (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/asi/instructions).

★Important Dates★
The submission deadline is 31 February 2021. All papers accepted for publication will be published immediately.

★★Contact:
Mr. Raynor Zhou
Email: asi@mdpi.com