Good real world example of wood-based sustainable chemistry

One of the principles of Green chemistry is the usage of biomass instead of crude oil for the production of chemicals and chemical goods. Wood refers to the term biomass along with agricultural residues, energy crops, and the biogenic part of waste such as solid municipal waste, landfill, sewage gas and farming waste. Wood is mainly composed of cellulose, lignin and hemicelluloses. Cellulose is the main component of wood and lignin is the main by-product of cellulose extraction. Our green approach to both of these polymers resulted in creating a new process for hydrocellulose fiber production and a new sorbent for oil spills removal based on hydrolysis lignin. It is worth pointing out that our approach provides the use of two main wood components in the frame of “cradle to cradle” cycle (Fig. 1) that supports the circular economy concept for research and process development (Clark et al., 2016).