A Trio of Green Successes

_{Posted on 01 February 2017}

‌‌The Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence (GCCE) has marked the start of 2017 with a spectacular trio of funding successes, resulting in new posts in the areas of sustainable future chemical manufacturing, circular economy, biobased solvents and bio-based products.

Future Manufacturing and Circular Economy: The GGCE will lead on collaborative project with Loughborough University and University of Nottingham to explore consequences of changing current manufacturing processes to more resilient, sustainable systems that embrace principles of the circular economy. The two year project has received £850,000 funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and will explore how systems can be improved to better utilise unavoidable food supply chain wastes (UFSCW). UFSCW has huge potential as a bio-resource as it contains a number of unexploited, bio-based materials and chemicals, with a range of potential commercial applications. The results from the project will be assessed at an industry level to determine any possible consequences for the entire UK food manufacturing sector.

Future Sustainable Solvents: Project, “ReSolve”, is a major new €4.5M Bio-based Industries (BBI) consortium grant aimed at the major industrial and research challenge of seeking sustainable and safe bio-based solvents. Led by the GCCE, it brings together the research expertise of the University of York and Wageningen University. Industrial partners include the companies Circa with whom the GCCE have an existing joint venture on the new solvent “Cyrene” and Nitto with whom the centre has been developing different novel solvent solutions. The provision of safe and economically viable bio-based solvents by ReSolve will allow the full benefit of regulatory restrictions on the use of aromatic and nitrogen-containing solvents to be felt without a negative impact on the economic security of the European solvents industries.

Future Biobased Economies: The GCCE has been awarded Horizon 2020 funding as part of a €5M multidisciplinary and multi-actor collaborative Research and Innovation Action (RIA) coordinated by Unitelma Sapienza University, Italy. The three-year project STAR-ProBio aims to promote a more efficient and harmonized policy regulation framework, needed to promote the market-pull of bio-based products within the context of a sustainable 21^st Century. This will be achieved by developing a fit-for-purpose modular sustainability scheme, linked to standards, labels and certification opportunities. The GCCE will lead on the development of suitable thresholds for indicators of environmental sustainability that allow for comparisons between bio-based products and their alternatives.

These success are associated with new Postdoctoral positions; details of which can be found on the University of York jobs page.