Highly Selective Synthesis of Acrylic Acid from Lactide in the Liquid Phase

Sustainable formulation polymers for home, beauty and personal care: challenges and opportunities

As society moves towards a net-zero future, the need to adopt more sustainable polymers is well understood, and as well as plastics, less visible formulation polymers should also be included within this shift. As researchers, industries and consumers move towards more sustainable products there is a clear need to define what sustainability means in fast moving consumer goods and how it can be considered at the design stage. In this perspective key challenges in achieving sustainable formulation polymers are highlighted, and opportunities to overcome them are presented.

Influence of the Synthesis Protocol on the Catalytic Performance of PHI-Type Zeolites for the Dehydration of Lactic Acid

Acrylic acid is an important basic chemical and a key starting compound for a variety of consumer products. Today, acrylic acid is still produced from fossil-based propene. If acrylic acid were produced from bio-based lactic acid, this would be an important step towards sustainability. The gas-phase dehydration reaction of lactic acid to acrylic acid was performed over eight-membered ring PHI-type zeolites in the Na+ and K+-form. A few variations in the synthesis procedure of PHI-type zeolite made a big difference in the performance during the catalytic reaction due to differences in the physical and chemical properties, especially the accessibility of the pores. The catalysts were characterized with ICP-OES, XRD, CO2 physisorption, SEM and 27Al MAS NMR. The calcination resulted in a partial collapse of the PHI structure. In the case of Na,K-PHI with a low surface area, the catalysis tends to take place on the outer surface, while in the case of Na,K-PHI with a high surface area the catalysis can also take place within the pore system. This has a considerable influence on the selectivity of the catalysts.

Sustainable production of propionic acid: catalytic deoxygenation of lactic acid over MoOx/Fe

The synergistic effect between MoOx and Fe markedly promoted the activity on deoxygenation of lactic acid to bio-propionic acid.

A Novel Biosynthetic Pathway for the Production of Acrylic Acid through β-Alanine Route in Escherichia coli

Acrylic acid (AA) is an important industrial chemical used for several applications including superabsorbent polymers and acrylate esters. Here, we report the development of a new biosynthetic pathway for the production of AA from glucose in metabolically engineered Escherichia coli through the β-alanine (BA) route. The AA production pathway was partitioned into two modules: an AA forming downstream pathway and a BA forming upstream pathway. We first validated the operation of the downstream pathway in vitro and in vivo, and then constructed the downstream pathway by introducing efficient enzymes (Act, Acl2, and YciA) screened out of various microbial sources and optimizing the expression levels. For the direct fermentative production of AA from glucose, the downstream pathway was introduced into the BA producing E. coli strain. The resulting strain could successfully produce AA from glucose in flask cultivation. AA production was further enhanced by expressing the upstream genes (panD and aspA) under the constitutive BBa_J23100 promoter. Replacement of the native promoter of the acs gene with the BBa_J23100 promoter in the genome increased AA production to 55.7 mg/L in flask. Fed-batch fermentation of the final engineered strain allowed production of 237 mg/L of AA in 57.5 h, representing the highest AA titer reported to date.

Sustainable production of pyruvic acid: oxidative dehydrogenation of lactic acid over the FeMoO/P catalyst

Novel redox of FeMoO/P by electron transfer between Fe and Mo is favorable for the oxidative dehydrogenation of lactic acid.