Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

This research program seeks to implement ecodesign and life cycle assessment (LCA) to engineer and evaluate bioproducts and processes from boreal fish, farm and forest resources, bearing discovery of new functions that can be integrated into current applications towards a bio/circular economy. We will use a combination of sustainable protocols for access and modification of functional ingredients from reverse flow systems to repurpose waste and use it as a design component for remanufacture. However, to bridge the gap between resource efficiency from circular design and environmental impact reduction through ecodesign, LCA indicators will be integrated from the earliest stages of the product and process life cycle. This will inform synthetic innovation for tuning structure-morphology-properties for performance comparable to commercial analogues. The long-term goal is to build a program that integrates a granular understanding of circularity and environmental design to develop functional bioproducts using complementary life cycle, circularity and sustainability metrics that contribute to UN SDGs 9,12,13 guided by 5 & 10. An interdisciplinary, collaborative action across academia, industry, community and government sectors will be required for resource, technology & business innovation to prevent burden shifting and inequity. In the short-term, I aim to integrate three objectives in a concerted manner (i) Identify, isolate and characterize functional ingredients from renewable or returning systems from biomass resources to modify at the molecular level using green chemistry (ii) develop & implement ecodesign strategies for bioproduct & process development for competitive function and performance (iii) Use LCA and Ecodesign tools at all stages of design and product life cycle to inform objectives (i) and (ii). Selection & use of materials, energy, chemicals, water and environmental parameters will be evaluated. We will use ecoefficient microwave digestion & organic synthesis to isolate functional ingredients (e.g. triglycerides, chitosan) to harness chemically reactive sites (alkene, amine) to conduct C-H, multicomponent or sol-gel chemistry under mild, aqueous or solventless conditions. Optimization will meet defined functional-unit criteria with an end-use (e.g. biosurfactant, platform chemical) and end-user (sex-based chemical toxicity) context. Materials will be characterized using viscosity, chromatographic, spectroscopic, microscopic and thermomechanical techniques. HQP who participate in my program will learn indispensable skills in sustainability-driven design and decision making. They will contribute to collaborative and equity-focused science. They will gain important skills in materials and process ecodesign, LCA and characterization using synthetic, analytical and assessment methods & tools. Importantly, they will gain skills with significance across multiple sectors in the growing sustainable resources economy.