Creating a renewable adhesive from bio-based materials

The students are working on a new renewable glue, and it's based on lignin. Lignin is nature's glue. It's the glue that holds wood together, and we remove that when we pulp wood to make paper and cellulose products. And this new method preserves the natural structure of lignin. And in that way, we can take advantage of its natural properties. And in this particular case, it looks like a promising thermosetting glue. In the realm of microplastics, one of the strategies to address that is to replace these materials with renewable polymers hoping that the microparticles that they produce, the nanoparticles, are somehow benign. I'm taking data for a life cycle assessment which is basically a green engineering process and comparing it to like other adhesive processes that are similar. Adhesives are critical. We're bonding everything everywhere and sometimes you don't appreciate where adhesives are sometimes the best adhesives are ones that are very very weak for instance on the post-it note you know so adhesives permeate our society it's really rewarding to kind of see what i'm learning in class like be applied like this and especially it's interesting to kind of see the foreground of this and like see how in the future it could be used in a manufacturing setting the beauty is the students have the resources here they become independent and they can come in and work on their own schedule and they don't have to have me present but if something comes up they have peer leaders the skills that can answer questions or address any emergencies so it's better for them, they can come in at any time and work and not depend on my schedule. So it's perfect.