Chemists harness electricity to create biomass-based building blocks

Chemists at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Utrecht University have developed a new method to produce a promising chemical building block from biomass. This compound can serve as a precursor for useful products such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and flavor and fragrance ingredients. Conventionally, its production requires hazardous chemicals. The Dutch research team now demonstrates that the process can instead be driven by electricity, using a simple setup and without the addition of dangerous chemicals. They published the results in ChemSusChem.