Bio based factory: Sustainable chemistry from wood

While often dispraised, chemicals have a deep impact on our lives with major applications in key areas such as, for example, human health, communications, energy, agriculture or food.
Their large-scale production, which is nowadays mostly performed from non-renewable fossil sources such as petroleum, natural gas or coal, is therefore crucial. The depletion of these fossil sources imposes a societal-driven shift to new feedstocks for chemicals which, in addition, must be renewable and non-edible. Wood, one of the most abundant carbon sources on earth, is ideal to address this challenge. The ambitious aim of the "Biofact" project is to transform lignin, currently mostly under-exploited, into high-value chemicals, and therefore switch to wood as a viable alternative to fossil sources traditionally used.
Coordinated by the KULeuven, brings together teams from the ULB (Gwilherm Evano, Laboratory of Organic Chemistry) Ulg, UA, UGent and the Leibniz-Institut für Katalyse.
Dates
Created on August 13, 2018