Gruter is Chief Technology Officer of chemical company Avantium, which focuses on renewable and circular polymers. He received the Royal Decoration in Delfzijl from the Dutch Minister for Climate and Green Growth, Sophie Hermans, during the festive opening of Avantium's Flagship Plant for the production of furanic dicarboxylic acid (FDCA) from plant sugars. FDCA is a crucial building block for the sustainable plastic PEF (polyethylene furanoate), a plant-based and circular polyester that offers a sustainable alternative to the widely used oil-derived plastic PET.

The development of the industrial production of PEF is an appealing, tangible result of Grutter's many years of developing sustainable chemistry in both industry and academia. Since 2016, he has been a professor by special appointment at the Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. There, he dedicates his chair in Industrial Sustainable Chemistry to the development of new materials that are fully circular and cause less to no pollution. He is a pioneer in developing new concepts to obtain building blocks for the chemical industry from natural raw materials.

Striving for maximum impact

To achieve maximum impact, Gruter not only works with industrial partners such as LEGO, but also deliberately set his sights outside chemistry and materials science. Working with environmental scientists, biologists and ecologists, for instance, he studies plastics degradability and their fate in the environment. And together with social psychologists, he investigates the social aspects of a transition to bio-based materials.

For a special chair, Gruter's academic group has a large size of around a dozen PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. He is also an enthusiastic lecturer who knows how to convey his passion for sustainability to his students, both during lectures and when supervising research projects or internships. He is known for his ability to make complex concepts understandable and can therefore regularly be seen as an expert in the media.

Apart from being a brilliant chemist, Gert-Jan Gruter is also a socially engaged individual with a strong moral compass and high ethical standards. His people-oriented approach and sense of humour make him a much-loved colleague and an inspiration to many.

See also

• Chair Industrial Sustainable Chemistry
• Interview: "I want to develop new materials that meet the demands of today"