Scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have developed a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable way to make a popular pain reliever and other valuable products from plants instead of petroleum.
Building on a previously patented method for producing paracetamol – the active ingredient in Tylenol – the discovery promises not only a greener path to one of the world’s most widely used medicines and other chemicals but also a new revenue stream to make cellulosic biofuels – made from non-food plant fibers – cost competitive with fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change.
“We did the R&D to scale it and make it realizable,” said Steven Karlen, a staff scientist at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center and lead author of the paper published in the journal ChemSusChem.
Read more here: https://energy.wisc.edu/news/biofuel-researchers-develop-better-way-make-painkiller-trees