Plastic That Grows on Trees
RICHLAND, Washington (ENS) – Replacing crude oil as the source for plastic, fuels and other industrial and household chemicals with inexpensive, nonpolluting renewable plant material has been a goal for decades of scientists.
Scientists have discovered the most effective method yet to convert glucose, found in plants worldwide and nature's most abundant sugar, to HFM, a chemical that can be broken into components for products now made from petroleum.
Today, a group of researchers reports in the journal 'Science' that they have directly converted sugars found widely in nature to an alternative building block for those products that make oil so valuable, with little of the residual impurities that have made the quest so difficult.
'What we have done that no one else has been able to do is convert glucose directly in high yields to a primary building block for fuel and polyesters,' said Z. Conrad Zhang, senior author who led the research.
Zhang is a scientist with the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis based at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.
That building block is called HMF, which stands for hydroxymethylfurfural. The chemical is derived from sugars such as glucose and fructose and is viewed as a promising alternative to petroleum-based chemicals.
Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature's most abundant sugar.
'But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging,' Zhang said. 'In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts,' including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals.
But Zhang and his team were able to coax HMF yields upward of 70 percent from glucose and nearly 90 percent from fructose, while leaving only traces of acid impurities.
The scientists used a unique non-acid catalytic system containing metal chloride catalysts in a solvent capable of dissolving cellulose. The solvent, called an ionic liquid, enabled the metal chlorides to convert the sugars to HMF.
The chemistry at work remains largely a mystery, Zhang said, a mystery he is working to decode. 'The opportunities are endless,' Zhang said, 'and the chemistry is starting to get interesting.'
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