Recent Advances on Purification of Lactic Acid.

With increasing interest in developing biodegradable polymers to replace fossil-based products globally, lactic acid (LA) has been paid extensive attention due to the high environment-compatibility of its downstream products. The mainstream efforts have been put in developing energy-efficient conversion technologies through biological and chemical routes to synthesize LA. However, to our best knowledge, there is a lack of sufficient attention in developing effective separation technologies with high atom economics for purifying LA and derivatives.