Project Activity

Our last webinar under the CCC project was held on 16 August 2022 featuring the presentation and discussion on “Cassava Value-Added Products”. We invited Prof Dr Suwabun Chirachanchai to share his expertise and experience in biochemical and biorefinery and the application of these concepts into cassava product development. He is a professor at the Petroleum and Petrochemical College (PPC), Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. His research focuses on fine chemistry and polymer chemistry with a special interest in bioplastic production. He has published over 120 research articles in world-leading journals.

Prof Chirachanchai initially introduced the audience to the concept of biorefinery and demonstrated that petroleum refinery products and biorefinery products are superimposed and that the trend is moving towards the latter. He also gave a specific example of how the market demand in polyethylene terephthalate or PET will potentially shift to polyethylene furanoate or PEF, which is a recyclable bioplastic that has the same properties as PET but is even better. With this substitution, we can change from a non-renewable to renewable society or green society. He then further explain the use of a biorefinery approach to convert cassava and its by-products/wastes into higher value-added products such as activated carbon, composite material, thermoplastics, biopolymers, ethanol, etc. One of the products he recommended as a promising pivotal compound is glucose, which is the key biorefinery starting material. Towards the end of his lecture, he emphasized “If you can change the agricultural products […] into glucose, you can have tremendous biochemicals, which in the future can be used to make polymers as much as petrochemicals”.