Catalytic transformation of biomass-based feedstocks in green solvents

This chapter keeps the readers knowledge abreast with the recent advances on the catalytic transformation of biomass-based feedstocks in water, binary mixture of water-organic solvents, and ionic liquids. In fact, there are several biomass-based feedstocks produced from various sources that are abundantly available on the earth. These include crops, agricultural wastes, forest residues, and many other organic wastes. Today, biorefinery turns out to be a privileged facility which enables all these renewable biobased feedstocks such as starch, cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, and vegetable oil to transform into a variety of value-added chemicals, biofuels, and biopolymers. Furthermore, the use of green solvents becomes one of the hard-pressing concerns in the domain of academia and industries in terms of ecofriendly and sustainable perspectives. Therefore we report a plethora of typical processes to transform biomass-based feedstocks into several valuable products. Finally, the limitations and future opportunities are well addressed in this chapter.