Soil is a precious and scarce resource. In Europe alone, 80 % of the land area is used for forestry, agriculture, industry and settlements.
In the wake of increasingly frequent periods of heat and drought, research is being carried out to make crop plants more resilient and to better understand their metabolic processes.
Whether wood residues, wheat straw, dairy residues or microalgae: In the production of important chemicals, fossil raw materials are increasingly being replaced by bio-based raw and residual materials.
Residual materials from agriculture, forestry, the paper industry and food production have long since become a valuable source of raw materials for new bio-based and sustainable products.
Plastics are not only polluting the water and land. The tiny nano- and microplastic particles (NMP) are also increasingly becoming a threat to ecosystems.
Adhesives are an integral part of our everyday lives. They can be used to bond a wide variety of materials such as glass and plastic or even wood and metal, ensuring the durability of a wide range of products. However, adhesives are usually based on petroleum-based raw materials and are extremely stable, which makes recycling difficult. In the BIOVIN project, researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis (LIKAT) in Rostock have joined forces with adhesives specialist Henkel to research bio-based adhesives that can be removed again.
The world's population is expected to grow to around 9.7 billion people by 2050, and feeding them will be a global challenge. Research has long been underway to make staple foods such as rice more productive and also more nutritious in terms of their ingredients.
The domestication of crops is one of the greatest technological revolutions in human history. Humans have domesticated only about 250 out of the total 374,000 plant species in the world. Around 20 of these are currently used for large-scale agricultural production.
As oxygen producers and CO2 reservoirs, algae contribute to the survival of the marine ecosystem and therefore also make a decisive contribution to climate protection. Algae, such as the green algae Ulva, have also long since become an important source of raw materials for industry. They are used to produce active ingredients for medicine or bio-based chemicals, food and animal feed or cosmetic products.