Pretreatment of plant feedstocks and agrofood waste using ionic liquids

Excessive usage of chemicals, accelerated depletion of nonrenewable resources, and the resultant impact on the environment have become a cause of great concern globally. Thus there is a need for the development of novel green technologies that can tap into the abundance of alternate resources such as lignocellulosic biomass and globally generated waste to manufacture products for consumption. There are recent developments in the utilization of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of raw materials for industries such as pharmaceuticals, food, and back to agriculture. Some of the sources for biomass include residue from forestry, sawmills, and paper industry. Agricultural waste sources include cereal straw, corncob, bagasse, and oil processing waste. But these feedstocks cannot be directly used for the product manufacturing due to the recalcitrant structure of the wood-based biomass sources. There is a need for pretreatment to make the source materials susceptible to further treatments. There has been significant development in this regard, but most of the pretreatment methods are costly, produce harmful by-products, or need extreme conditions. There has been a growing focus on the usage of ionic liquids (ILs) as they have a unique property of being green, recyclable, and reusable multiple times without losing much of its performance. ILs have also proven to be an effective method for the pretreatment and the resultant substrate becoming more efficient in further enzymatic hydrolysis for the production of reducing sugars such as glucose and xylose.