Friday, August 15, 2025

Plastic from plants: FAMU-FSU College of Engineering professor uses material in plant cell walls to make versatile polymer

Florida State University

Researchers — image:
From left, Arijit Ghorai and Ho Yong Chung hold samples of lignin-based polyurethane. The research team used lignin and carbon dioxide to create a new kind of polyurethane that is biodegradable and doesn't contain toxic chemicals.
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Credit: Scott Holstein/FAMU-FSU College of Engineering

In Ho Yong Chung’s laboratory, magic is at work — plants turn into plastics.

In new research, Chung, an associate professor in the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, showed for the first time the possibility of using lignin, a material found in plant cell walls, and carbon dioxide to create a new kind of polyurethane, a polymer used in various applications for its ability to regulate heat, flexibility during processing and strength as a finished product.

The work was published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

“We’ve created a high-quality polymer using fewer steps, less energy and no toxic ingredients,” Chung said. “It’s better for the environment, better for people and easier to manufacture.”

WHAT THEY DID
Traditional polyurethane relies on compounds called isocyanates, which are highly reactive and hazardous. Chung’s method skips them entirely. By using the natural polymer lignin, they created a material that is biodegradable, made from a renewable and underutilized resource and avoids toxic chemicals. Their discovery keeps the benefits of polyurethane but avoids its disadvantages.

Although lignin has some applications in modern manufacturing, it is usually treated as a byproduct of pulp and paper processing.

The breakthrough from Chung’s team creates the same high-performance materials in traditional polyurethanes but uses abundant waste from paper mills and captured carbon dioxide. The resulting material is as strong and heat-resistant as conventional versions but dissolves easily in solvents for manufacturing.

WHY IT MATTERS
The ability to be easily processed gives this material a major advantage over other biomass-based alternatives to petroleum-based plastics.

“Scalability is big for us, because we are a polymer science group and we’re always trying to scale up and commercialize and industrialize our research technology,” Chung said. “This has much better processability compared to other alternatives used to recreate polyurethane. We use far fewer reaction steps to produce the same quality or higher quality of material. That saves a lot of energy, which is good for the environment and for cost and efficiency. We spend less money to produce the same or higher quality of polyurethane.”

LOOKING TO LIGNIN
Chung’s previous research has explored the possibilities for using lignin to make other types of environmentally friendly plastics. In work published in 2024, he showed the possibility of using it to create polycarbonate, material from another polymer family.

This research expands what is possible with lignin by focusing on polyurethane. The polymer’s flexibility and elasticity mean it is more widely used than polycarbonate.

Chung first became interested in lignin in graduate school, when he sought to develop it for use as an adhesive. At the time, there was little research into this material. When he began his career, he continued to focus on it because it offered the possibility of breakthroughs in medical applications, energy and sustainable materials.

“Polyurethane is a very important material,” Chung said. “By producing it with a new and non-toxic method, we can help the world.”

POWERED BY FSU
Chung credited FSU’s support for helping bring this vision to life. With a lab space in the university’s new Interdisciplinary Research and Commercialization Building, access to internal funding and a collaborative network of top-tier scientists, he has been able to push the boundaries of sustainable chemistry.

“FSU gave me the space, the tools and the people to make this happen,” he said.

COLLABORATORS AND FUNDING
Postdoctoral researcher Arijit Ghorai was the lead author of the study. This research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office and the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy of the Republic of Korea.

Raw lignin powder and lignin-based polyurethane samples in Ho Yong Chung’s lab in the Interdisciplinary Research and Commercialization Building at Florida State University.

Credit

Scott Holstein/FAMU-FSU College of Engineering

Journal

ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering

DOI

10.1021/acssuschemeng.5c02064

Article Title

Biomass Lignin- and CO2-Based Non-Isocyanate Polyhydroxyurethanes

Ireland's proposed climate targets risk locking in global hunger

University of Galway

Infographic_2025.jpg: — image:
This infographic summarises central findings from the study. It explains the concept of temperature neutrality, highlights how Ireland’s proposed target locks in a disproportionately high share of methane warming, outlines trade patterns that undermine food security claims, and shows how such an approach risks derailing global climate goals if adopted more widely. Photo: Colm Duffy
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Credit: Dr Colm Duffy: University of Galway

Tuesday August 12, 2025: New study finds proposed Irish climate targets protect methane emission privileges at the expense of poorer nations' development.

The transition to a sustainable and equitable food system is being undermined by a new approach to climate target setting by livestock exporting countries such as Ireland and New Zealand, an international study by climate scientists has warned.

The study led by University of Galway in partnership with the University of Melbourne, University College Cork and Climate Resource has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The scientists have called out the new “temperature neutrality”, also known as "no additional warming", which allows Ireland to maintain a high share of global agricultural methane emissions while claiming to meet its climate targets.

This approach dramatically reduces the level of ambition needed for overall greenhouse gas emission reduction. The resulting targets have been proposed to the Irish Government by the Climate Change Advisory Council, in part to reduce potential disruption from Ireland’s legal commitment to achieve national climate neutrality by 2050.

Temperature neutrality is a concept based on stabilising a country’s contribution to global warming, rather than aiming for the more ambitious, established target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions. In effect, temperature neutrality requires modest reductions in methane emissions from high-emitting countries, denying methane emission “rights” to countries with low methane emissions. As methane emissions are strongly linked with agricultural production, widespread adoption of temperature neutrality would lock-in current inequalities in the global food system, by reducing the need to curtail or offset methane emissions in current livestock exporting countries such as Ireland.

The study shows that such exports overwhelmingly go to other wealthy, food-secure countries. Meanwhile, temperature neutrality severely restricts the development space for agriculture in low-income, food-insecure countries where livestock products are most needed to improve nutrition.

Furthermore, the temperature neutrality approach underestimates the level of emissions offsetting required in livestock exporting countries, delaying the development of new markets for farmers in those countries to deliver solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises.

Lead scientist, Dr Colm Duffy, Honorary Lecturer in Agri-Sustainability, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences and Ryan Institute, University of Galway, said: “If every country adopted a temperature neutrality target, we’d seriously jeopardise the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C, or even 2°C.

Worse still, this approach doesn’t just weaken climate ambition, it entrenches inequality. It protects the status quo for wealthy countries while placing an unfair burden on poorer, food-insecure countries, limiting their ability to grow their own food systems.”

The international research team ran a number of scenarios to assess the impact of the policy - which has also been proposed in New Zealand - on global mean temperatures.

Apart from “business as usual”, the temperature neutrality approach performed the worst in terms of global warming emissions.
By 2050, Ireland’s per capita methane emissions would remain almost six times the global average.

Dr Duffy added: “The science shows that the new policy essentially grandfathers methane emissions - meaning a country’s future share of warming is based not on equity or ambition, but on historical share of emissions. In essence; 'I had more, so I get more'.”

Dr Róisín Moriarty, Research Fellow at the Sustainability Institute at UCC, said: "A ‘no additional warming’ approach to target setting amounts to backsliding on a country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement and is not a reflection of ‘highest possible ambition'. With less than 3 years of global carbon budget remaining to limit warming to 1.5°C, with a 50% chance of achieving it, countries around the world need to do as much as they possibly can to achieve the rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions needed to keep within the 1.5°C temperature goal."

Professor Hannah Daly, Professor in Sustainable Energy at UCC, said: "Methane emissions are responsible for around 40 per cent of global warming to date – methane’s short lifetime in the atmosphere means that cutting its emissions is an essential lever to limit global warming to safe levels. For a country like Ireland, with outsized methane emissions, to base our long-term climate target on simply stabilising warming is inadequate to meet our global obligations and sets a dangerous precedent.”

David Styles, Associate Professor in Agri-Sustainability, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences and Ryan Institute, University of Galway, said: “Ireland’s agricultural sector has huge potential to contribute towards a future climate neutral and biodiverse economy, but this requires big changes over time. Establishing a robust and internationally defendable climate target is vital to plan for a just transition, not just internationally, but for Ireland’s farmers. Temperature neutrality falls short.”

Dr Duffy is a Research Fellow on the FORESIGHT project and Honorary Lecturer in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at University of Galway. He was one of a number of signatories to an open letter that criticises a similar policy proposal in New Zealand.

The research was supported by funding from the Department of Climate Energy and the Environment for the FORESIGHT and CAPACITY climate modelling teams.

The full study can be read here: 10.1088/1748-9326/adf12d

Ends

Media queries to pressoffice@universityofgalway.ie

Journal

Environmental Research Letters

DOI

10.1088/1748-9326/adf12d

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

National temperature neutrality, agricultural methane and climate policy: reinforcing inequality in the global food system

Article Publication Date

12-Aug-2025

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAl

Paper: Decarbonize agriculture by expanding policies aimed at low-carbon biofuels

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

image:
University of Illinois agricultural and consumer economics professor Madhu Khanna and her colleagues propose policies that would reward farmers for adopting “climate-smart” practices when growing biofuel crops.
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Credit: Photo by Fred Zwicky

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A team of agricultural economists, environmental scientists and policy experts envisions a path toward a carbon-neutral agricultural future by expanding the reach of policies designed to promote low-carbon biofuels for transportation and aviation. In a new paper in the journal Science, the researchers propose policies that would reward farmers for adopting “climate-smart” practices when growing biofuel crops and remove the hurdles that currently thwart such efforts.

Climate-smart practices include techniques that build soil carbon, like cover-cropping, not tilling fields after harvest and adding biochar or finely ground silicate rock to soils; and those that reduce the carbon footprint of crop production, like optimizing the timing of fertilizer application, electrifying farm vehicles and improving crop genetics.

Studies show that, if adopted globally, “climate-smart” farming practices could reduce carbon emissions by 4-8 billion tonnes per year, the researchers wrote. To put that in perspective, in 2024, global carbon dioxide emissions reached an all-time high of about 40 billion tonnes.

“Biofuel markets can be a pathway decarbonize agriculture as a whole,” said Madhu Khanna, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and lead author of the new report. Khanna is the director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment and a researcher in the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, at the U. of I.

“Currently, our biofuel policies don’t reward farmers for adopting climate-smart practices,” Khanna said. “For example, they treat all corn grown for the corn-ethanol market the same, whether or not the farmers adopt those types of practices. By accounting for differences in practices implemented at the farm level and paying a premium for corn grown with climate-smart practices for corn ethanol, biofuel policies can incentivize adoption of these practices.”

Biofuel markets have already established mechanisms for accounting for the carbon-intensity of different feedstock types and have well-developed channels for transferring payments from energy markets to biofuel producers, the researchers report. This opens the door to using these channels to expand performance-based incentives to increase the adoption of climate-smart practices in agriculture.

“For example, the ‘40B’ Sustainable Aviation Fuel tax credit of 2023-2024 was designed to differentiate the credit based on the climate-smart practices adopted while producing the crop,” Khanna said. “The lower the carbon intensity, the higher the tax credit paid for sustainable aviation fuels and for the crop used to produce it.”

At present, however, the channels for crediting farmers for soil-carbon sequestration or other climate-friendly practices on the farm are segregated from the markets that provide credits for low-carbon biofuels, Khanna said. To be compensated for their sustainability efforts in growing the crops, farmers must either enroll in a conservation program or sell carbon credits to one of several companies specializing in agricultural carbon offsets. Space is limited in government conservation programs, however, and farmers must prove that they aren’t already engaging in climate-smart practices to obtain credits. This requires a lot of extra effort on the farmer’s part.

“It also means that early adopters get penalized,” Khanna said

Khanna and her colleagues propose an approach for merging the biofuel feedstock market and climate-offset market into a single channel to reward farmers and others in the biofuel supply chain who use practices that lower the carbon-intensity of their operations. This approach could subsequently be broadened to reward farmers for adopting climate-smart practices for crops to supply food and feed markets as well.

Like existing policies, any new approach would require verification that farmers are actually implementing the practices they’ve pledged to follow.

“Emerging digital technologies and modeling advances can document farming practices and accurately calculate their carbon intensity. This can simplify and scale this process,” said Bruno Basso, a co-author of the study and an expert in modeling and digital agriculture at Michigan State University. Certification programs could allow independent verification that feedstocks were sustainably produced.

Calculating the changes in the amount of carbon sequestered in crop soils precisely each year is a more daunting task, the authors wrote. But “using multiple process-based ecosystem models can reduce the uncertainty in these estimates and avoid the need for labor-intensive soil sampling procedures,” Basso added.

Another concern is the chance that farmers will implement and then abandon various climate-smart practices, Khanna said.

“If they do it one year and not the next, they’ll sequester the carbon and then, perhaps, release it back to the atmosphere the following year,” she said. “But we can design incentives for longer-term soil-carbon sequestration by having farmers sign longer-term contracts. This would relate the size of the payments to how long the farmer agrees to keep that carbon in the ground.”

Khanna acknowledges that the carbon benefits from existing biofuels are controversial. Some critics argue that devoting farmland to the production of plant-based fuels takes up land that can be used for food crops and can contribute to the conversion of forests to cropland in other parts of the world, erasing its sustainability gains.

But current approaches could be under- or overestimating the carbon benefits of biofuels by disregarding the carbon effects of crop management practices implemented on the farm producing the crop for the biofuel market.

“By developing a market for agricultural products that accounts for all the direct and indirect carbon emission effects from the farm to the consumer, we can better address these concerns,” she said. “The main premise of our proposal is that we need to have a full and accurate assessment of carbon emissions from the beginning to the end of any product’s life cycle. And right now, the way that biofuel policies are designed, they treat crop producers supplying crop for a biofuel as all being the same.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation supported this work.

Khanna is also an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U. of I.

Researchers have installed a device to measure how different farming practices affect carbon flux on the farm.