New Trends in Natural and Synthetic Polymer Science

Book excerpt: This collection of texts written by well-recognised specialists was constituted having in view these important directions of actual research. Sustainable economical growth requires safe resources of raw materials for the industrial production. Today's most frequently used industrial raw material, petroleum, is neither sustainable, because limited, nor environmentally friendly. While the economy of energy can be based on various alter-native raw materials, such as wind, sun, water, biomass, as well as nuclear fission and fusion, the economy of substances is fundamentally depending on biomass, in particular biomass of plants. In the last decades because of the crude oil and other natural resources crisis, a new alternative has been proposed consisting in utilisation of renewable natural resources as feedstock and fuel, among which the biomass is the most promising.