Blogs written by Lee Enterprises Consulting Bioeconomy Expert(s)
Sustainable investing is here. According to Morgan Stanley’s 2019 biennial survey of financial institutions, insurers, and pension funds in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, 80% said that they actively integrated sustainable investing. The trend towards increased attention to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors has only strengthened over the past two years as the…
Is PET biodegradable? PET is short for polyethylene terephthalate. It’s a clear, strong, and lightweight plastic widely used for packaging foods and beverages, especially convenience-sized soft drinks, juices, and water. Nearly all bottles of carbonated soft drinks and water sold in the U.S. are made from PET, which is also popular for packaging salad dressings,…
Bioplastics are moldable materials made up of chemical compounds synthesized by things like bacteria or genetically modified plants. Unlike traditional plastics that are made from petroleum, bioplastics are made from renewable resources, and normally contain fewer ingredients from fossil fuels (with some containing none). Some bioplastics are completely biodegradable and compostable. Their origin (renewable v.…
Biochar for wastewater treatment, both municipal and industrial, is a good alternative as such multistage process accommodates a constantly changing influent. One of the most critical steps in the process is the aeration basin in which microbes work in conjunction with an adsorptive media such as biochar. Biochar’s porosity makes it ideally suited to this…
As part of a technical due diligence effort, the team is often requested to perform a Technical Readiness Assessment. This will assign a score to the technology, known as the Technical Readiness Level (TRL). Originally developed by NASA in the 1970’s, it was adopted by the US DOD in the early 2000’s, followed by the…
When developing an industrial fermentation process, the choice of the production organism dictates much of the large-scale fermentation characteristics in addition to the nature of research and development and process development. Well characterized strains with a large genetic manipulation tool set, such as Escherichia coli, can rapidly deliver R&D goals, yet E. coli tends to…
What is the difference between carbon dioxide remediation and removal in biogas? Both are processes that change the raw biogas to another useful form, but there is a distinction. Carbon dioxide removal is a form of remediation, but it is a more sophisticated and costly step in the “cleanup” of biogas. Normally, the reason to…
Biogas is a gas mixture developed from naturally occurring processes in nature. Basically, bacteria that exist in our world digest organic material, and the by-product of their digestion is biogas. Biogas is a mixture mainly of methane and carbon dioxide, but invariably contains many other compounds. Some of the more significant compounds are considered contaminates,…