European Summer School "Production of fuels, specialty chemicals and biobased products from agro-industrial wastes and surplus"

The chemical industry developed over the past century using petroleum as its primary feed-stock. A number of economical, political and social forces are now leading the chemical industry to consider renewable plant-based feed-stocks in addition to/instead of petroleum, which is going to be available on the market at acceptable costs only up to 2040. Agro-industrial wastes, residues and surplus, which are generated at amounts higher than 100 trillions kg per year, provide a low-cost and uniquely sustainable resource for production of some fuels and chemicals currently produced from fossil sources. Bio-based products obtainable from such sources fall generally into three categories: a) commodity chemicals, including fuels such as ethanol, methane, hydrogen, etc.; b) specialty chemicals, such as amino acids, vitamins, antioxidants, flavours and flagrances, chiral compounds, etc. and c) biomaterials, such as biopolymers, cellulose, oils, lignin, etc. Some of these products are directly obtained from the agro-industrial wastes or surplus through tailored recovery procedures whereas others are obtained through chemical and in particular biological processing of main biomass components. The costs of bio-based products are often relatively high, mostly for the fact that the industry dealing with their production is still underdeveloped and dominated by processing costs. Such costs can be significantly reduced by intensifying the research and development activities in the field. This in turn requires the education of the public and policymakers and in particular of the personnel involved in the product and process design and development. In fact, such processes generally consist of a sophisticated combination of different principles and instruments of the modern biology, chemistry and engineering sciences, and therefore their design, development, and management require a broad and interdisciplinary background that is often not provided by the current EU University programs. On September 4, 2006, a total of 32 selected young European scientists and engineers coming from 8 different EU Countries and 1 non-EU countries along with 27 Lecturers coming from 11 different EU countries participated in the 5 days-International Summer School entitled “Production of fuels, specialty chemicals and biobased products from agro-industrial wastes and surplus”, held at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna. The school was sponsored by the Alma Mater Studiorum-University of Bologna (Italy) and the Italian Interuniversity Consortium “Chemistry for the Environment”, INCA (Venice, Italy). Marcopolo Environmental Group SpA (Borgo S. Dalmazzo, Cuneo, Italy), the Interdivisional Catalysis Group, Italian Chemical Society (Milan, Italy) and Novamont SpA (Novara, Italy) also supported the school organization. This school was specifically addressed to provide to selected scientists and engineers a critical overview on the industrial processes currently applied to produce bio-based molecules and products along with biofuels from agro-industrial wastes and surplus and on the main objectives and challenges of the research in progress in this field. Additional specific issues related to the sector have been presented by the participants through 16 posters; 6 of them have been selected as best posters by a committee composed by all school lecturers and have been presented and discussed orally during the last section of the school. This book provides a summary of the key information presented and discussed at the school. We believe that this collection of lessons may be useful to people who were not able to participate directly. It is towards those individuals that it is directed.