Chemists at Wageningen University Research (WUR) and Utrecht University have developed a new method to produce a promising chemical building block from biomass. This compound can serve as a precursor for useful products such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and flavor and fragrance ingredients. Conven tionally, its production requires hazardous chemicals. The Dutch research team now demonstrates that the process can instead be driven by electricity, using a simple setup and without the addition of dangerous chemicals. They published the results in ChemSusChem. ...read more read less