A team of scientists led by a University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate in collaboration with two faculty members has developed a plant-based alternative to a common but toxic ingredient used to make plastic water bottles and food containers.
The research, published in the journal Nature, details a novel strategy for turning a plant biomass historically treated as waste into bisphenols, a class of chemicals used to make plastics and resins.
If successful at an industrial scale, the technology could help replace toxic petrochemicals such as BPA while also generating new revenue streams to make cellulosic biofuel as cheap as fossil fuels.
“This can be used to replace petrol-based bisphenol for polymers like epoxy resin and polycarbonate with comparable properties,” said Xuejun Pan, a professor of biological systems engineering who contributed to the study.
Read the full story here: https://energy.wisc.edu/news/uw-madison-grad-turns-biomass-safe-replacement-bpa?elqTrack=true