Bio‐Based Chemicals and Sustainability

Abstract

Abstract The world faces unprecedented threats as a result of what have become known as grand challenges. These include some of the greatest policy issues of the day: food, water and soil security, resource depletion, and climate change. Into this perplexing vista has arrived the bioeconomy concept, which envisages a gradual replacement of fossil‐based feedstocks with bio‐based ones, resulting in bio‐based products, especially bio‐based fuels, chemicals, and materials. While this replacement implies an inherently more sustainable production system, this is not necessarily the case; each feedstock, fuel, chemical, or material must currently be judged on a case‐by‐case basis. There is no unified system for assessing their sustainability, which leads to inefficiencies and a slowing down of the process to arrive at this future, which can be viewed as a historic transition, akin to the wood‐to‐coal and coal‐to‐oil transitions. Both of these transitions took at least decades. The bioeconomy transition cannot wait that long – climate change and other grand challenges are forcing our hand. This article looks at the technologies, the barriers, and some of the policy issues to hasten this sustainable future.