Agroindustrial best practices that contribute to technical efficiency in Brazilian sugar and ethanol production mills

Stella Vannucci Lemos, Alexandre Pereira Salgado, Alexandre Duarte, Marco Antonio Alves de Souza and Fernanda de Almeida Antunes

Energy, 2019, vol. 177, issue C, 397-411

Abstract: The agricultural and industrial indicators that contribute to the efficiency of sugarcane mills were investigated in this study. A two-stage Data Envelopment Analysiswith output approach was applied to 271 mills for the data from the 2006/2007 season to the 2015/2016 season. The first stage consisted of the elaboration of two efficiency models using the total milling yield of the crop (t) and the amount of total recoverable sugars (t) as the input variables and the productions of sugar (t) and ethanol (m3) as the output. The second stage identified the production process variables significantly influencing the efficiency through multiple linear regression. In addition, with the help of sugarcane experts, ten variables related to the efficiencies of the agricultural and industrial processes of sugar and ethanol production, which contribute to the overall productivity of the sugar-energy units, and 40 best practices were developed to observe, improve, and control these indicators in order to increase the global efficiency of the agroindustrial production units.

Keywords: Brazil; Agroindustrial best practices; Efficiency; Two-stage DEA; Sugar and ethanol mills; Renewable energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219306607
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:177:y:2019:i:c:p:397-411

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.04.053

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().