CA24110 - Resource-Inclusive Renewable Materials: Leveraging Global Biomass for Sustainable Innovations (ReInvent)

Modern society still relies heavily on fossil-based feedstocks for materials production, driving additional carbon emissions. Harvesting atmospheric carbon, so as to close the carbon-cycle, is of the utmost importance. Given the abundance of biologically sequestered carbon as a byproduct of our society, e.g. agricultural and forestry residues, pathways to their use in future materials production are sought.  

The advancement of biomass deconstruction techniques has resulted in the production of more uniform and well characterised biomass-derived chemical and material streams, which are being used to develop sustainable bio-based products. However, to this day biorefinery processes which are able to operate on a feedstock-agnostic basis are not the norm, and the difficulty of predicting how the isolated fractions and building blocks will affect material properties make the whole value chain extremely expensive, causing a bottleneck in the development of novel products from laboratory to industrial scale. 

Our ReInvent COST Action will convene European and international competence, aligning scattered research efforts from across the globe to leverage various expertise for trans- and multidisciplinary science and realise our vision of resource inclusive renewable materials. We will bring together experts in chemistry, engineering, agriculture and forestry, biomass deconstruction, chemical analytics, separation, and materials science to focus on feedstocks-agnostic processes and the early-stage prediction of material properties, as well as techno-economic and environmental feasibility of the whole value chain. Ultimately, we will push society beyond the status quo, accelerating the transition towards truly sustainable and inclusive solutions.