Top Curr Chem (Z) (2018) 376:3
Fig. 2 The agro-industrial waste hierarchy modified from [15]. The main idea is to promote sustainable production and consumption systems through zero-waste biorefinery
life-cycle stage to another, one geographical area or environmental compartment to another. One of the most important and cited references highlighting the advances in genetics, biotechnology, process chemistry, and engineering that has helped estab- lish a new manufacturing concept to convert renewable biomass into valuable fuels and products, known as biorefinery, was published by Ragauskas and collaborators in the mid-2000s [16]. According to these authors and other researchers [16, 17], integrating biomass and biorefinery technologies has the potential to develop sus- tainable bio-based energy and materials leading to a new manufacturing paradigm (Fig. 3). In fact, this paradigm is currently connected to other strong concepts, i.e., bio- economy and circular economy; the latter is described as an industrial system that is restorative by intention and design. This idea replaces the end-of-life notion with regeneration, focusing on the use of renewable energy, elimination of toxic chemi- cals, reutilization, return and eradication of “waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems, and business models” [18, 19]. As can be noted, new generations of biorefinery combine innovative biomass resources from different origins, chemical extraction and purification and/or syn- thesis of biomaterials, biofuels and bioenergy via benign processes. From the very beginning, the identification and quantification of all potentially high value-added
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