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Unit 4

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Three Things You Need to Know About Bioproducts Welcome back, everyone! Today I'm going to tell y'all about how we turn crops into sugar, how the process of fermentation works, and finally I'll introduce you to a new biobased product that I'm super excited about. Let's dive right in.   Sugar Glucose is a simple sugar (a monosaccharide), and we use it for tons of stuff, including plastics and fuel. So, how do we get glucose out of plants? First, we categorize biomass into three groups: sugar crops, starchy biomass, and lignocellulosic biomass. ( Lesson 18 )   ( Plant Biomass )                          We get sugar from sugar crops by putting the canes or roots through a mill to extract their juice, which we then purify and refine to produce sugar. Corn is the primary starch used for sugar; to extract sugar from corn we grind it up in a mill to produce the starch which is then hydrolyzed with dilute acids or e...
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Unit 3

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Wood: the Pluses, the Minuses, and the Neutrals Hey everyone! This week's blog is fun for me because it's all about lumber, which is something with which I'm very familiar. I spent the first few years of my life in the lumber store that my parents owned, and I've done a lot of woodworking, using lathes with my dad, who's a woodworker and has made a lot of furniture and artistic pieces, and doing construction work on our houses! Because of this experience, I know a bit about different types of wood and their uses; like how cedar is good for siding, pine is good for framing, and hardwoods like white oak and hickory (which is super hard) are good for furniture. However, there was still a lot about wood that I didn't know from my own experience with it. For example, I didn't know about engineered wood or paper products, and I hadn't interacted much with the concept of carbon neutrality. Now that I do and I have, I'm ready to tell you all about it! Engine...
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Unit 2

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All feedstocks, biorenewables included, have to be sourced from somewhere Heyo, welcome back to the blog. I hope you're ready to get into feedstocks! I sure am. Before we roll up our sleeves and get into it, though, do y'all have any idea what a feedstock is? I didn't until recently. Allow me to enlighten you! Feedstocks are raw materials that are used in the manufacturing or production of some other product, usually fuel. So like, corn, for example, is a raw material that's used to produce ethanol; crude oil is another raw material, used to produce gasoline ( Feedstock ). Now that we know what feedstocks are, let's talk about where we get them. We mainly grow biorenewable resources in two forms: trees (woody plants) and crops (herbaceous plants) ( Lesson 8 ). These are the primary resources from which biomass-- biorenewable feedstocks-- are sourced.  Woody Biomass ( Quantifying environmental effects ) The three main systems that we typically use to produce woody b...
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Unit 1

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Consumption, resources, and the environment: What you need to know   Hello friends, family, and random people on the internet, and welcome to my blog! If you're thinking,  Have I stumbled back into 2012?  don't worry, this isn't a blog about Avril Lavigne or my travels to Disney World. This blog is a space for you to learn, think, and converse about the resources that we humans use and the impacts that the production and consumption of those resources have on our precious earth.  Now, before we can get into this discussion, you're going to want to know what sort of resources we're dealing with. First of all, we're talking about natural resources; that's the stuff that's naturally occurring in the environment, like coal, wood and water. There are two main types of natural resources, renewable and nonrenewable . Renewable resources are the ones that grow again fairly quickly-- like, within our lifetime-- or never run out, like corn that we can replant on t...
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