Pyrolysis of Waste Biomass as a Recycling Alternative. Processes and Applications

SPANEVELLO, R. A.

Porto Alegre

Conferencia; Royal Society of Chemistry Brazil Roadshow; 2013

Royal Society of Chemistry

The strategy of the three ?R? (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) plays a key role to improve sustainability and are written in a specific order that corresponds with the effectiveness of environmental impact that can be achieved. The first two are more related with social behavior while the third one with technical aspect since it implies the reprocessing of the materials. The generation of high-added value products from waste, derived from the anthropogenic activity either urban or industrial, is an attractive technical challenge but also an ethical duty for us, as chemists.Starting from cellulose microcrystalline, paper waste or cellulose mud (a waste from paper industry), we have optimized the conventional pyrolysis conditions and developed new microwave-assisted pyrolysis to degrade the polymeric chain into a useful building block named levoglucosenone.Levoglucosenone was effectively employed for the generation of chiral auxiliaries, chiral catalysts in solution and in solid phase, organocatalysts and as starting material for enantiospecific synthesis.On the other hand, the pyrolytic process applied to soybean hull (a by-product from soybean oil refineries), which have a high content of cellulose, provided the opportunity to transform the original biopolymer into a crude material with an interesting variety of chemical structures that could be tested for different biological activities. An autographic assay showed the presence of antioxidant compounds with potential industrial applications in bulk.