SWEETWOODS biorefinery delivers first tons of high purity lignin and wood sugars

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Type of post: NEWS.

The flagship biorefinery of the SWEETWOODS project has reached its first milestones with the delivery of industrially representative samples of high purity lignin and wood sugars available at the ton scale for testing at novel value chains.
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Figure 1. SWEETWOODS biorefinery (taken from the press release)

The BBI JU funded SWEETWOODS flagship plant is now ready to ship out industrially representative samples of high purity near-native lignin and wood sugars at the ton scale. The project’s leading partner Graanul Biotech has stated that the first phase construction works of the flagship were finished in 2020 and that the construction of the second phase, where hydrolysis, separation processes, and lignin drying will be established, has started. Graanul Biotech estimates that an industrial supply of lignin and sugars will be available the last quarter of 2022.

The novel fractionation plant uses sustainable hardwood biomass to demonstrate, on an industrial scale, how novel pre-treatment technology in combination with innovative enzymatic solutions can provide high-quality lignin and wood sugars. This unique technology converts over 90% of hardwood into usable high-quality feedstocks for biomaterials and biochemicals and enables establishing novel bio-based value chains with a low ecological footprint.

One of the goals of the SWEETWOODS project is to establish markets for lignin and sugar-based platforms:
- Tecnaro, which develops and produces thermoplastic compounds, composites and blends, confirms that high-purity lignin from the SWEETWOODS project can be used as a substitute for conventional lignin in biocomposite production, offering improved product quality without odour.
- Recticel is currently evaluating on lab scale which (depolymerised) lignin types are most suitable for incorporation in rigid foam for insulation boards. The most suitable candidates will be further upscaled and screened on a semi-industrial scale.
- Global Bioenergies has successfully scaled up the production of bio-isobutene from wood derived sugars at the ton scale. The company is also progressing very well towards the commercialisation of renewable cosmetics with the first EU registration of a key cosmetic-grade ingredient derived from fermentative isobutene.

An important part of the project is to evaluate the environmental and socio-economic performance of the SWEETWOODS plant, feedstock, and of the developed products. The consortium member 2B has been working on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the whole wood fractionation process to calculate the environmental impact of the outputs of this process: sugar concentrates and lignin. The LCA has allowed the identification of the environmental hotspots of the fractionation process, which are useful in an eco-design perspective. The LCA results are currently being compared with other biorefining processes and products to get a numeric estimate of the environmental benefits of the SWEETWOODS flagship technology.

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