Biorefining of the agro-food wastes for the recovery of phenols as chemical building blocks for the industrial chemistry to come

In the EU, the agro-food industry produces about 250 million ton of wastes per year. A little amount of these wastes is used for material and energetic recovery while the major amount goes to processes, which could be described like “biological combustion”, such as the disposal or the composting. These wastes are renewable raw materials, a viable sources of fine chemicals to be used as such or to be transformed to synthetic products or to bio-fuels if an Integrated Use Policy is made of their special functional properties such as biocompatibility, potential biodegradability, non-toxicity and a favourable CO2 balance. Phenol are one of the most important chemical fraction from the petroleum refinery for the production of several industrial materials and then the agro-food wastes could constitute the main economical industrial source of biophenols from the biorefinery as chemical building blocks for the production of bio-based materials for the near future.