Sonja Vlaar
CONTRIBUTION IN ORIGINAL LANGUAGE
Cooperation between the United Kingdom and Brazil has shown that sugar cane and wheat straw waste from agricultural processes can be processed directly into valuable chemicals with a 5000-fold increase in value.
In contrast to fossil fuels, biofuels are renewable. However, the production of biofuels is economically very demanding compared to fossil fuels.
Plants such as sugar cane and wheat straw are common in Brazil and the UK. This agricultural by-product is currently being burned rather than reused. The new breakthrough shows that high-quality chemicals, such as chemicals used in the food industry and precursors for therapeutic human medicines, can be produced directly from waste biomass in a single “one-pot” process. The entire process can be comparatively inexpensive.
The work is part of a UK-Brazil scholarship. In the UK, the University of Manchester, the University of Warwick and UCL received over £ 2 million in this project.
Picture: Pixabay
