O-16 稲わらの収集と酵素糖化原料としての利用

抄録

Rice straw has a potential as a sugar source for ethanol in Japan. However, there are some problems to commercialize ethanol production from rice straw. We paid attention to the high collection and storage cost due to high water content of rice straw just after harvesting rice and the resistance to enzymatic hydrolysis. In order to overcome these two problems, we have developed two treating methods of rice straw to work on storage in a wet condition and on improvement of enzymatic hydrolysis: one is hot-pressing treatment and the other is compression grinding treatment supplemented with lime. We evaluated effectiveness of these two treatments in this study. The hot-pressed rice straw showed high glucose yield in enzymatic hydrolysis and strong resistance to biological decomposition. The density of hot-pressed rice straw was over 1 g/cm³, which can improve cost of transportation and storage. The compression grinded rice straw also showed high glucose yield and resistance to decomposition. The density was around 0.5 g/cm³, lower than that of hot-pressed rice straw but over twice as high as that of roll baled rice straw. These results indicated the two methods we proposed were effective in cutting the collection and storage cost and in improving the sugar yield in enzymatic hydrolysis.