The Globe and Mail highlighted a partnership between UBC’s Okanagan campus and a company that aims to pull natural and industrial chemicals out of hybrid poplar trees.
Susan Murch, a chemist at UBC’s Okanagan campus, will identify the chemicals in the hybrid poplar cocktail and figure out how to make the best use of them.
“Hybrid poplars have been bred specifically for this purpose and they are more efficient at it than many other tree species. They grow very fast and produce quite a lot of biomass, and then the question is what do you do with the leaves and the shoots and the trunks of the trees? … You need to harvest them and process them to extract the various chemicals back out. That’s where I come in,” she said.
Similar stories appeared on Castanet and the Kelowna Daily Courier.
