Organic waste as a sustainable feedstock for platform chemicals

Marta Coma, Elias Martinez-Hernandez, Felix Abeln, Sofia Raikova, Joseph Donnelly, Thomas Arnot, Michael Allen, Dang Diem Hong, Christopher James Chuck

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

99 Citations (SciVal)
126 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Biorefineries have been established since 1980s for biofuel production, switching lately from first to second generation feedstocks in order to avoid the food versus fuel dilemma. In a lesser extent, many opportunities have been investigated to produce chemicals from biomass using by-products of present biorefineries, simple waste streams. Current facilities apply intensive pre-treatments to deal with single substrate types such as carbohydrates. However, most organic streams such as municipal solid waste or algal blooms present a high complexity and variable mixture of molecules, which makes difficult specific compound production and separation. Here we focus on flexible anaerobic fermentation and hydrothermal processes that can treat complex biomass as a whole to obtain a range of products within an integrated biorefinery concept.


This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 665992.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)175-195
Number of pages21
JournalFaraday Discussions
Volume202
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2017

Keywords

  • organic waste
  • biorefinery
  • anaerobic digestion
  • renewable feedstocks
  • platform chemicals

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Engineering (miscellaneous)
  • Biotechnology
  • Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
  • Bioengineering
  • Environmental Engineering

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