A critical review of the transformation of biomass into commodity chemicals: Prominence of pretreatments

Abstract

Biomass production has been increasing steeply with rise in population across the globe. Majority of the produced biomass has been un-utilized and thrown to landfill or discarded without proper disposal. Due to production of greenhouse gasses, possible land, and groundwater contamination due to presence of trace organic contaminants (TrOCs), various countries across the globe have implemented stringent regulations or even banned landfill for waste deposition. On the other hand, depletion in available resources and ever-increasing product demand, utilization of waste to recover value added products has been need of the hour across the globe. Biomass, a low-cost and abundant nutrient resource having a tremendous potential for replacement for fossil fuels dependence. Pre-treatments like physical, chemical, and biological were applied on biomass for product specific application recovery. However, commercialization of recovered value-added products by utilizing biomass is still far from being achieved because of social unacceptability (i.e., public acceptance) due to the presence of contaminants. So, this review discusses about utilization of various pre-treatments for recovery of commodity chemicals from biomass and it addresses how the presence of TrOCs in biomass influences the recovery of products during their conversion.

Keywords

• Biomass
• Renewable resource
• Commodity chemicals
• Contaminants
• Pre-treatment