Eleven contributions by the group at the First International Congress on Residual Biomass Valorisation

For three days, Universidad de Sucre brought together researchers from several countries around a shared question, how to turn waste into energy and valuable products. The programme featured eleven keynote lectures, with speakers from Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Spain and the United States, and seven thematic tracks ranging from thermochemical and biochemical conversion to machine learning. Daniel Otero Meza coordinated the editing of the book of abstracts, published by Editorial Unisucre.

The seven oral talks involving the group covered almost the whole residual biomass chain. Eduardo Arroyo Dagobeth presented the pelletising of rice husk and corncob, and Daniel Otero Meza a machine-learning model that projects municipal solid waste disposal in Colombia from GDP per capita. With other authors, the group also contributed work on the state of waste management in Sucre, the energy potential of Sincelejo's marketplace waste through anaerobic digestion, the pyrolysis of maize stalks and cassava residues, and the gasification of municipal waste from seven Colombian cities.

In the poster session, the group brought four trend reviews, a bibliometric analysis of municipal solid waste management and studies on the use of waste cooking oil in bioplastics, bio-oil production from residual biomass and the composting of municipal waste.

Several of those ideas matured later. The pelletising of rice husk and corncob reached the journal Recycling in 2025, waste projection with time series remains one of the group's lines of work, and the bio-oil models for cassava residues were presented that same year at the International Conference on Sustainable Solid Waste Management in Rhodes.