Versatile
Rivertop’s platform technology has created a credible, scalable and versatile means of producing renewable chemicals for a broad array of consumers. The platform can create several building block and high-value chemicals by utilizing a variety of natural sugar feedstocks.
The platform can create several building block and high-value chemicals by utilizing a variety of natural sugar feedstocks.
Importantly, the U.S. Department of Energy has resolved that twelve primary chemical building blocks can be produced from plant sugars. Rivertop’s technology permits the economical creation of one critical building block chemical, glucaric acid (also known as saccharic acid). Glucaric acid is transformed into usable salts and lactones, collectively known as glucarates or saccharates. These, in turn, can be transformed into a variety of derivative chemicals and polymers, each with unique characteristics.
An affordable supply of glucarate will enable entrepreneurs, engineers, chemists and material scientists to add value to tomorrow’s bioproducts by building them from this biodegradable, non-toxic building block chemical.
Glucarate applications are extensible into several markets—industrial uses, environmental protection & remediation, building materials, health and hygiene and possibly recreation materials. Glucarate’s properties and subsequent promise as biodegradable source material for polymers further expand the variation available to innovators.
Glucarate is made from glucose, the most abundant and least expensive simple sugar available. It is common in grain starch as well as wood and grass cellulose (collectively and commonly called “biomass”).
Rivertop technology can use other common sugars to make other renewable chemicals such as xylaric, arabinaric, mannaric, galactaric/mucic, and ribaric acids. We can utilize such plant sugars once they are separated from biomass, such as grains, grasses and wood. Source diversity provides cost stability in fluctuating commodity markets. The technology is not bound by geography, permitting the safe and practical manufacture of chemicals around the world based on the economic conditions and renewable resources available.