Franco-British Collaboration

The Franco-British collaboration on converting biomass to chemicals brings together the complementary expertise and interests of the IAR competitiveness cluster in France with those of the Green Chemistry Centre (GCC) at York and its collaborators so as to more rapidly progress the highly important sector of developing new and efficient routes to sustainable chemicals from non-food bioresources.  By combining the downstream chemistry research represented by the GCC with the upstream development skills and facilities represented by IAR, the partnership can progress ideas through the R&D pipeline from discovery to commercialization.  Additionally, the collaboration brings together green chemistry with white biotechnology, providing scientific and technological complementarities and enabling the partnership to cover many areas of biomass utilization including biomass-derived platform molecules but also renewable materials and green technology development.

Following this highly successful workshop the lead IAR and GCC staff are now collating collaboration opportunities identified by the delegates – these include academic-academic research, and academic-industry research and development as well as potential collaboration in training and education.  The workshop would not have been possible without the help of the French Embassy in London, the British Embassy in Paris, IAR and GCC.  The organizations will continue to work together to take the emerging partnership to the next stage; a meeting of key staff will take place in London in April with the intention of reviewing the collaboration opportunities, and discussing mechanisms of collaboration with the goal of having real collaborative activities running before the end of 2010.  The working party will also decide on the continuation of the workshops with a view to planning a 3rd bilateral event.