The Digest’s Top 10 Innovations for the week of July 5th

The pace of invention and change is just too strong, we’ve realized, to highlight annual or even quarterly or monthly rankings and summaries of significant product and service advances. For now, we’re going to be tracking these on a weekly basis to keep pace with the changes. Here are the top innovations for the week of July 5th.

#1 Global Bioenergies successfully moves its C3 process to Demo scale

In France, Global Bioenergies reached a new milestone in scaling up its C3 process converting renewable resources into isopropanol and acetone. These two biobased compounds target large markets in the cosmetics and solvent segments. They can also be converted into polypropylene, a key component in the plastics industry. A first pilot run was successfully conducted in December 2017. A demonstration run of several cubic meters, representing a further 20 fold increase in scale has now been successfully carried out, and paves the way towards a first commercial plant.
The C3 process, which enables the production of renewable isopropanol and acetone, is the second process reaching Demo plant scale in Global Bioenergies’ portfolio. This process is based on a breakthrough innovation: bacteria with a core metabolism rewired in order to increase the production yields from sugars, and thus reduce the production costs of biobased products.