Among lignocellulosic residues, peach tree prunings are widely abundant in Italy, due to an extensive production and a high yield of prunings per cultivated hectare; thus, it represents an interesting feedstock for no food derived ethanol.

In the whole production process, the pretreatment is the most critical step from technical and economic point of view. In this work peach tree residues were submitted to alkaline pretreatment, in order to maximize the fermentable sugar recovery and thus to maximize the theoretical etOH yield evaluating the best operative conditions in terms of NaOH concentration, temperature, and reaction time.

The analysis is carried out by means of Response Surface Methodology approach, in order to optimize the pretreatment step. The optimal predicted conditions to perform the process were NaOH concentration = 0.200 mol dm^-3, temperature = 125 °C and reaction time = 35 min, that allowed to obtain a theoretical ethanol yield of 223 L t^-1 of dry peach tree pruning.

This theoretical yield can be judged satisfactory in the context of forest and pruning biomass and it could be further increased by a future scale up from laboratory to pilot scale.

在木质纤维素残留物中，由于种植面积大和每公顷耕地的修剪率高，桃树修剪在意大利广泛盛行。因此，它代表了没有食品来源的乙醇的有趣原料。

从技术和经济角度来看，在整个生产过程中，预处理是最关键的步骤。在这项工作中，对桃树残留物进行碱预处理，以最大程度地提高可发酵糖的回收率，从而最大程度地提高理论etOH收率，从而根据NaOH浓度，温度和反应时间评估最佳操作条件。

为了优化预处理步骤，通过响应曲面方法学方法进行了分析。进行该工艺的最佳预测条件是NaOH浓度= 0.200 mol dm ^-3，温度= 125°C和反应时间= 35分钟，这使得干桃树修剪的理论乙醇收率为223 L t ^-1。

在森林和修剪生物量的情况下，可以认为该理论产量令人满意，并且可以通过将来从实验室规模扩大到试验规模来进一步提高。