## 3 Results  
In Figure 3, the results of the nine indicators for both the corn cob grit and corn cob pellet and other products are presented. The two materials show similar indicators in all the evaluated categories, with constantly higher values for the processes for the pellet preparation. The more evident differences are referred to freshwater eutrophication and the mineral, fossil, and renewable resource depletion impacts, with corn pellets providing impact values, respectively 49% and 40% higher than corn grits. Overall, the productionprocess of cob grits has lower impact (about 27%) than cob pellets. The impact results of cob-based materials, CP and CG, have been compared with WP and SC respectively, as shown in Figure 3. The cob grits demonstrate to have less impact, on all the indicators, if compared to the silicon carbide abrasive inert. In particular, the corn cob grits production presents a land use indicator of 0.186 kg C deficit compared to 9.913 kg C deficit of the silicon carbide, as visible in Table 5. Considerable differences can also be observed for freshwater eutrophication, human toxicity, acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, and water resource depletion. Another important result is that climate change impact of the corn cob grits resulted in being negative, and equal to \(-0.882\) kg CO\({}_{2}\) eq, significantly lower than silicon carbide value, equal to 6.071 kg CO\({}_{2}\) eq. Analogous results, favorable to the corn cob product, can be also observed in the other application, where the two different kinds of pellets are analyzed. In this case, the cob pellet has significantly better results than wood pellet, in terms of freshwater eutrophication, mineral and other resources depletion and, most importantly, climate change. In fact, the climate change impacts are both negative, showing that they are virtuous processes in terms of equivalent carbon dioxide emitted. However, the carbon footprint of the cob pellet is around eight times lower than the wood pellet. A further parameter of interest for the  
Figure 3: Presentation of the results of the impact analysis based on the nine selected impact voices, comparing corn cob grits (CG) and pellet (CP) with silicon carbide (SC) and wood pellet (WP): CG results are blue, CP results are light blue, SC results are orange, and WP results are red. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c} \hline \hline
**Categories** & **Corn Cob Grits** & **Silicon Carbide** & **Corn Cob Pellet** & **Wood Pellet** \\ \hline Acidification (molc H+ eq) & 0.001 & 0.037 & 0.001 & 0.003 \\ Climate change (kg CO\({}_{2}\) eq) & \(-0.882\) & 6.071 & \(-1.147\) & \(-0.1585\) \\ Freshwater ecotoxicity (CTUe) & 2.101 & 51.024 & 2.895 & 3.2765 \\ Freshwater eutrophication (kg P eq) & \(6.63\times 10^{-6}\) & 0.004 & \(1.35\times 10^{-5}\) & 0.0002 \\ Human toxicity(CTUh) & \(7.20\times 10^{-9}\) & \(3.27\times 10^{-7}\) & \(9.6\times 10^{-9}\) & \(2.15\times 10^{-8}\) \\ Land use (kg C deficit) & 0.186 & 9.913 & 0.233 & 0.314 \\ Resources depletion (kg Sb eq) & \(4.53\times 10^{-8}\) & \(1.31\times 10^{-5}\) & \(7.71\times 10^{-8}\) & \(2.52\times 10^{-7}\) \\ Terrestrial eutrophication (molc N eq) & 0.002 & 0.052 & 0.003 & 0.005 \\ Water depletion (m\({}^{3}\) water eq) & 0.001 & 0.11 & 0.002 & 0.002 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: Impact analysis results based on ILCD2011+ impact categories. scope of the research could be the evaluation of the energy demand during the production phase. The energy demand results, visible in Figure 4, exhibit trends similar to the other impact categories. In fact, the silicon carbide shows an energy demand considerably higher, 139.4 MJ, than other products. The cob products and the wood pellet have analogous demand. However, the cob grits process has an energy demand 22% lower than the cob pellet process, which has, in turn, 18% higher impact than the wood pellet. Globally, the cob grits show the lowest impact among the four investigated products.