U Of I Researchers Receive Major USDA Grant To Convert Biowaste Into Pavement

Jan 10, 2023

By Marianne Stein

A team of University of Illinois researchers received a $2.5 million USDA grant for a project to explore conversion of food waste and swine manure into pavement binder and transportation fuels.

The proposal, “Pave the way: From Organic Waste to Renewable Roads With Advanced Resource Recovery Delineation (FORWARD),” is one of three projects funded through USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Bioproduct Pilot Program, which supports research and development of value-added products from agricultural commodities to enhance a circular bioeconomy.

“Many of our daily-life products are created from derivatives of crude oil. That includes not only fuel, but also lubricants, heating oils, asphalt, and plastics. Petroleum will eventually run out, and we need to find alternatives that are recyclable and renewable,” states Yuanhui Zhang, Founder professor of agricultural and biological engineering (ABE) and principal investigator on the grant. The team also includes Paul Davidson and Cody Allen, ABE, Ramez Hajj, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Yalin Li, Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment (iSEE).

“We will use a hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) reactor system to convert biowaste into biocrude oil through a high-temperature, high-pressure process. This mimics petroleum formation in nature, where biowaste buried deep underground gradually turns into crude oil over millions of years. In the HTL reactor, the process takes less than an hour,” Zhang explains.

The main output from the HTL reactor is biocrude oil, which will be separated into transportation fuel and a biobinder that can be mixed with gravel to create asphalt for road pavement. The HTL wastewater, which is high in nutrients, can be recovered for use as fertilizer. The researchers will also evaluate the viability of the process via technoeconomic analysis (TEA) and life-cycle analysis (LCA).

Every year, the U.S. produces millions of tons of food and agricultural waste, costing billions of dollars for collection and management. Creating bioproducts can help reduce the high costs of managing waste, mitigate adverse environmental impact, and sustain economic development. Recycling biowaste can also lead to a significant reduction in landfills, which often are disproportionately located in underserved communities.

“Adopting a more circular economy ensures that wealth and other economic benefits in the form of jobs and other opportunities are created, and stay, in rural communities,” says U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a press release from NIFA announcing the grants. “We must support and incentivize practices like these, because it’s what consumers want — and what farmers, and our planet, need.”

Source : illinois.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids