**5. Conclusions**

Sustainable industrial chemistry requires "optimum" reaction pathways, as defined by the highest carbon economy, starting with various biomass materials. Biomass is a sustainable feedstock, while currently used starting materials, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, are unsustainable. Furthermore, when industrial chemicals are made from unsustainable feedstocks, they eventually add additional carbon to the environment, typically in the form of carbon dioxide, an earth warming gas. Manufacturing industrial chemicals from biomass is an important step toward mitigating climate change.

The chemical industry has to recognize that continuing the use of nonsustainable feedstocks to manufacture industrial chemicals is not a viable option, especially with the growing concerns about climate change. Utilizing the existing chemical industry and simply using feedstocks derived from biomass is the most economical and expedient way to accomplish two major goals: make the chemical industry more sustainable and slow the increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Eventually, it will be a strategy to avoid carbon taxes on the top 100 industrial chemicals.

In this paper, a systematic method of generating the reaction pathways from various biomass sources to the top 100 industrial chemicals, which maximize the overall carbon economy, was presented. It provides a listing of multiple ways of manufacturing the industrial chemicals in the order of deceasing-carbon economy.
