Circular Growing and Chemistry

ongoing

The agricultural sector is looking for new ways to generate revenue and improve value chains that contribute to a circular economy, sustainability of production and consumption and healthy food. This is best done by focusing on mission-driven innovation in the chain. The petrochemical industry produces highly developed materials, but development is under pressure due to climate problems. The limits of what our ecosystem can still cope with have been reached in the petrochemical production of small molecular building blocks that are necessary for fine chemicals, medicines or high-quality materials. Circular Teelt and Chemistry focuses on these changes and seeks to harness the enormous potential of biological material by exploring alternative and sustainable cultivation techniques and combining them with modern biorefinery technology and advanced synthesis and production methods. Instead of using the well-known bulk materials from agricultural plant biomass, such as (hemi-)cellulose or lignin, the project chooses the small biomolecules that plants also produce. The challenge is to realise square value in existing crops, with optimisation in cultivation to biomolecules. The project aims to obtain high-quality molecular building blocks from the residual streams of local crops that are already cultivated such as nettle, grape, blueberry, strawberry and asparagus. After bio-extraction and further synthetic upgrading, these building blocks are used for ‘smart materials of the future’ or as nutraceuticals (medicinal functional nutrition). The project focuses on three pathways: research, identification and development of optimal cultivation and growing conditions aimed at obtaining high-quality small biomolecules from ‘Limburg’ crops improving green extraction/biorefinery technology and sustainable advanced conversion (synthesis and production) methods needed for the ‘smart materials of the future’ setting up and developing sustainable cyclical value chains for functional biobased chemicals/materials/nutraceuticals.

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