COST DRIVERS

Economically, cassava pulp upcycling for dairy is dominated by logistics and stabilization costs, not by raw material purchase price alone. First, transport cost per unit of DM is the principal bottleneck for wet pulp streams; as moisture increases, the system pays to move water, making distance-to-plant and backhaul logistics decisive. Second, the drying-versus-ensiling choice is fundamentally a trade-off between energy/capital costs (drying infrastructure, fuel, labor) and spoilage/handling risk (ensiling demands compaction, sealing, feed-out discipline, and additive budgets). Third, storage losses (DM shrink, aerobic spoilage) can erase apparent feed-cost savings; recent silage microbiology work emphasizes that aerobic deterioration during feed-out is a predictable failure mode unless management and inoculant strategy are aligned with substrate properties [53]. Finally, circular feeds require quality control costs that are often omitted from economic comparisons: basic DM/ash screening, periodic mycotoxin surveillance (risk-based), optional cyanide testing triggers, and recordkeeping are part of the true cost of “making residues feed-grade,” and Codex guidance for cassava matrixes explicitly foregrounds prevention and control measures across handling and storage as necessary risk management steps (even when the end use is feed) [112]. Available cassava-specific case evidence also suggests that circularity pathways are sensitive to local infrastructure and awareness. Among 240 cassava processors in Nigeria, current waste management was dominated by dumping, runoff, and burning, while awareness of biogas technology was only 21.25%; however, willingness to adopt biogas technology rose to 74.17% after awareness creation. These results suggest that economic feasibility is shaped not only by engineering costs but also by local management capacity, access to technology, and whether residues can be moved into higher value uses at all [154].