A Biorefinery is a chemical plant that mimics an oil refinery in it's idea to extract valuable products from a complex input. However, rather than extracting products from oil, the biorefinery focuses on biomass inputs, for example waste from the logging industry, food industry and household waste. 

Through the separation of biomass into it's three most common constituents, lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose, these can then be processed further into more valuable products such as sunscreens, fuels and polymer materials. The research is currently ongoing and there are currently some commercially operating biorefineries, however, these do not focus on lignin and in the future, researchers hope to use biorefineries to produce chemicals beyond what is possible from oil.

Today's guest was Dr. Filippo Brienza who studied lignin extraction from biomass at the University of Loauvain, now he works at BiCT srl on various research projects for the development of extractive, enzymatic and downstream processes. Follow him on LinkedIn if you are interested in his work: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filippobrienza/