Back to the Future with Biorefineries: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches toward Polymers and Monomers

The establishment of novel biomass processing schemes is key for achieving the much-needed carbon neutrality and counteract global warming. Biomass provides a range of monomers and macromolecules with great potential to replace petro-based materials in a wide range of applications. While important developments are ongoing in the biorefinery space, cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary partnerships are paramount to speed up and de-risk the industrialization of such technologies, and an integrated view is necessary to achieve process feasibility. This perspective explores both bottom-up and top-down approaches for biomass valorization based on the main natural polymers and monomers that can be extracted or isolated from biomass. A special emphasis is put on scalability, economic feasibility, and resource availability while the biggest challenges in the path toward the development of biorefineries are also discussed.