HAEMOGLOBIN · From biomass to catalysts and chemicals: exploiting blood and food waste towards high-value products.

From biomass to catalysts and chemicals: exploiting blood and food waste towards high-value products.

Catalysts are entities that are able to accelerate chemical reactions. This is crucial for our society, since they can drastically reduce the reaction time (from years to hours in the most extreme cases) to prepare useful chemicals, while also lowering energy consumption of a given process. Their contribution to society amounts to almost 40% of world's GDP since they are needed in most chemical processes, ranging from drug manufacturing to agricultural applications, or plastics for instance. However most catalysts are based on precious and expensive metals, such as Palladium or Platinum. For the countries of the EU, these metals have to be imported from foreign countries, with questionable labour laws and with ever-increasing and volatile prices. Furthermore, most metals are toxic and need to be treated carefully if they are involved in the making of products destined to be consumed by human beings, such as drugs. Alternatives mustbe found to reduce our reliance on precious metals. One solution consists in extracting metals from industrial waste. For instance, slaughterhouses produce considerable amounts of blood waste, that cannot be easily disposed of, and could be reused. In particular, the oxygen-carrying protein contained in blood, hemoglobin, naturally contains iron atoms. While these atoms are normally involved in the transportation of oxygen, it could be used for other catalytic applications. Our goal here is to make an iron-based catalyst from hemoglobin, and apply it to industrially-relevant catalytic applications.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union