🎓Adsorbents from renewable raw Materials and waste Materials for Applications in Wastewater Treatment: Correlation between Adsorption Behaviour and Chemical Structure

In the course of sustainable rethinking, it is extremely important to obtain chemical resources primarily from renewable raw materials. One possible candidate that can also be used in the long term in a wide variety of preliminary stages of the chemical industry is lignin. To this end, doctoral student Jonas Bergrath is examining various biogenic wastes (including waste wood and pomace from wine production) in order to isolate lignin that is as "green" as possible. Since lignin is extremely difficult to characterise and reproduce, he is using a wide range of analytical and computational chemistry methods to identify possible structure-property correlations. The overall goal is to link the physicochemical properties (including adsorption and behaviour in solvents) with structural elements of lignin and to use it as an adsorbent for small organic molecules (e.g. pharmaceuticals) in wastewater treatment.