Green Building blocks
This work package develops environmentally benign tools and processes for making safe, nontoxic building blocks (or monomers) for the polymers from renewable feedstocks. Polymers are the main components in plastics and the nature of the monomers used largely defines the properties of the plastic product.
An important consideration for the production of chemical building blocks is the sustainability of the feedstocks as well as the process technologies. Renewable feedstocks include mostly organic material obtained from agriculture, forestry, aquatic plants, algae – generally called as biomass, but also organic wastes generated as a result of human activity, and gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
When using biomass we consider aspects such as availability in the region and in Europe, potential competition with food, feed, and other industries, environmental impact, and policies impacting their use. Among the biomass streams that are being evaluated are those from production of sugar, starch and paper pulp obtained from our industrial partners. Pretreatment and fractionation of several of these streams is required to separate the biomass components and obtain cleaner sugar stream for use as raw material for producing the building blocks.
The process technologies for transformation of the feedstock will follow the green chemistry principles where besides the renewable feedstocks, high atom economy, heterogeneous catalysis, low energy consumption, reduced waste, etc. will constitute important parameters.
Routes for transformation of sugars as well as CO2 will be designed based on microbial-/enzymatic-/ chemical conversions, constructed and optimized. and evaluated with respect to production efficiency, economic- and environmental sustainability.
The research groups participating in WP1 are Departments of Biotechnology and Chemical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of Lund University. Several companies including Bona, Nordic Sugar, Lyckeby, Polykemi and Södra also cooperate in this WP.