A BridgeTTe Sciencepreneur Spotlight
A lot of „sustainable material“ claims quietly rest on a detail most people never think about: the solvent used to process the raw biomass in the first place. Get that chemistry wrong, and you trade one environmental cost for another. A team at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava has spent its research on getting it right.
The Sustainable Cellulose Materials Group is led by doc. Ing. Katarína Vizárová, PhD. and Ing. Veronika Majová, PhD. at STU’s Institute of Natural and Synthetic Polymers, within the Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology. The team combines expertise in cellulose chemistry, deep eutectic solvents (DES), pulp processing, material engineering and sustainable manufacturing. The technology currently sits at TRL 4, several DES systems have been developed and validated at laboratory scale for biomass processing and cellulose modification, with spin-off potential still being explored rather than committed to.
What they’ve built?
The platform enables the development of sustainable cellulose-based materials for packaging, conservation, biomaterials and advanced technology applications. Its core innovation is combining tailored deep eutectic solvent systems with renewable feedstocks and, in future, data-driven optimisation tools, allowing materials to be engineered for application-specific properties under environmentally responsible processing conditions, rather than defaulting to a generic output.
Who it’s for?
The application list spans further than „materials science“ suggests: sustainable packaging and protective materials, cultural heritage conservation, functional cellulose-based materials generally, circular bioeconomy technologies, materials design and optimisation, data-driven materials development, and industrial decarbonisation.
The road ahead.
At TRL 4, the team’s priority is validation and scale: access to advanced materials characterisation and pilot-scale processing facilities, validation of material performance in real industrial and application-specific environments, collaboration with research infrastructures and industrial partners for demonstration and scale-up, and partnerships in digital modelling and machine-learning-driven materials development.
Why it matters to the BridgeTTe community?
This is deep-tech at its earliest, least glamorous stage: validated chemistry looking for the pilot line, the industrial partner, and the funding that turns a laboratory result into a material anyone can actually order. If you work in advanced materials, sustainable packaging, conservation science, or circular bioeconomy, or know a facility that should meet this team, this is a bridge worth crossing.
Get in Touch with the Sustainable Cellulose Materials Group
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EISMEA. Neither the European Union nor the EISMEA can be held responsible for them.
