A U.S. Department of Energy lab, Building the Circular Bioeconomy in the North San Joaquin Valley, has just been awarded up to $47.3 million by Schmidt Sciences' Virtual Institute on Feedstocks of the Future, Innovation News Network reported.
It will use the funding to analyze agricultural waste in its area of central California and create a database that manufacturers can use to find materials for eco-friendly products.
Also known as BioCircular Valley, this project will examine everything from fruit peels and almond shells to tree trimmings.
"California has this incredible diversity of materials, but they aren't well understood," said one of the project leads, Corinne Scown, per Innovation News Network. Scown is a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, both of which are partners in the project along with BEAM Circular. "This makes it difficult to know how to extract the most value out of them."
According to Scown, there are many potential eco-friendly uses for these materials that would otherwise just be discarded.
"We want to characterize them and make that information available so companies can more easily figure out which feedstock is a good match for them and then use that agricultural residue to make everything from bio-based polymers and chemicals to sustainable materials and aviation fuels," she said.
To make that possible, BioCircular Valley will create a publicly available, user-friendly database complete with a map, Innovation News Network said. It will show each material's location, what time of year it's available, how much sugar and lignin is in the material, how it performs in different reactions and applications, what it might cost, how it's currently being disposed of, and how much impact it has on the environment.
The researchers will also use artificial intelligence to assess their lab results and make predictions.
Having all this information in one place will make it that much easier for companies to find the ideal material for their projects and for groups to figure out where they can make the biggest difference to the environment. It could even entice biomanufacturing companies to the area, generating jobs, Innovation News Network suggested.
"This project is designed to benefit a region that has massive potential but has so far been economically left behind," said project lead Blake Simmons, director of Berkeley Lab's Biological Systems and Engineering Division, per Innovation News Network.
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