Lars William Schick

The global climate crisis highlights the need to replace products created from petroleum sources. Biomass has emerged as a good alternative for this purpose, particularly biomass that is produced as waste in the agricultural and forestry industries. In our research group, we separate the three major components found in terrestrial biomass: lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose. With hemicellulose separated, we break this polymer into smaller molecules, called monomers. These monomers are subsequently reacted with lignin to modify its structure. The last step is to recombine modified lignin with cellulose. Most of our work is centred around modifying lignin with different monomers from hemicellulose to see how we can correlate molecular structures with different macroscopic properties. This general methodology can be applied to make diverse materials with characteristics similar to commercially produced plastics from petroleum.