What is Bio2X?
We at Fortum want to engage our customers and the society to join the change for a cleaner world and sustainable solutions. Fortum Bio2X is a development programme that aims to bring to market products made from biomass, especially straw, that can replace environmentally harmful materials in a number of applications. Straw is a residue from food production and offers great potential for efficient use of sustainable raw material that would otherwise be discarded or even burned.
We want to be one of the forerunners who enable more biomass-based applications. Our vision is to become the straw refiner with superior material efficiency and a leading supplier of responsible straw-based textile fibres.
More end products with superior material efficiency
In the future, our local biorefineries will enable a flexible use of locally available raw materials. Bio2X relies on fractionation technology that enables over 90 percent conversion efficiency from biomass into polymeric cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin fractions. All fractions can be applied in added value materials.
Sustainable use of raw material
In India, for example, straw is often burned in the fields which causes significant climate and health problems. Instead, straw could for instance be used in textiles to replace environmentally harmful cotton. If cotton fields are turned into wheat fields and 30 percent of the wheat straw is used for products, we could get an equal amount of textile fibres with less water usage while producing grain for food.
As a result, we would have more natural end products with less resource consumption and significantly smaller environmental impact. If all agri-biomass in the fields in the Delhi region’s three states could be used as raw material, we could replace over 50 percent of the global cotton production.
