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Advanced Biorefinery Towards a New Innovation in Biocomposites Uses: How Sustainable this Journey is!
Abstract
The thermochemical and biochemical conversion of biomass are striving towards developing materials, chemicals and fuels (bioproducts). Again, the well-accepted biorefinery approach has been envisioned for a sustainable growth of such emerging biobased industries. One of the major challenges for these industries is the disposal and management of their downstream products generated during the biomass conversion. Such coproducts and byproducts from biofuel industries currently being undervalued and show tremendous potential in value-added biocomposite uses. World Economic Forum estimates that the biorefinery sector across the whole biomass valuechain would generate $340 billion per year by 2020. The advanced biorefinery approach is targeted to recover the value from every coproduct of biomass conversion, ensuring the sustainability. “There is no such thing as waste – these are coproducts that look for an opportunity in new value-added industrial uses†– is defined here as “advanced biorefineryâ€. This article highlights the recent advances in the utilization of coproducts from biofuel and pyrolysis industries for biocomposite manufacturing.