Bioeconomy next era of economy…
 Ajaz Ahmed

You might have heard about the formation of fossil fuels with the statement like this

“Hundreds and thousands years ago trees were buried under the soil and then with the passage of time, under high temperature and pressure, were converted to fossil fuels”.

Today global economy is based on these fossil fuels. All the things are made from these fuels or their byproducts starting from plastics, rubbers and even fueling the vehicles & power plants. But these have serious concerns in terms of long term availability and environmental protection.

These days, a new concept, an alternative to this fossil economy known as Bioeconomy, has emerged. This economy carries the same concept as of fossil fuels but processing with chemical and/or biological routes.

Under this economy, simply take the trees as raw materials, process them chemically and extract major components for biofuels and biomaterials production. This approach is theoretically strong enough to replace the existing fossil based economy. But still there are big challenges that need to be addressed to make this economy as strong future candidate. Many countries like USA, Canada, Asian and European countries are making rigorous efforts to develop new processes for the establishment of such commercial scale plants.

Until now Brazil and USA has successfully launched biofuels as alternative to the petroleum fuels. Brazil is using sugarcane for bioethanol and USA is using corn for this purpose. Additionally, all other big global research players, China, South Korea, Europe and Canada are making efforts to develop plastics, rubbers and battery materials from the tree based biomasses. Still, they need to go a long way with a more state of the art processes.