Crops are playing an increasing role as industrial raw materials as they can yield a wide range of products, are renewable and are associated with positive environmental impacts, in contrast to petroleum-based materials. This book describes in detail the range of industrial crops and uses.

Industrial Crops and Uses is divided into eight parts with the first part giving a useful overview. The other parts are split according to the different uses that are made of industrial crops, namely: bioenergy, industrial oil, industrial starch, fibre and dye, rubber and related compounds, insecticide and land rehabilitation. There are several chapters within each part as appropriate to the subject.

Chapters have been provided by some 53 contributors, predominantly from the USA, but also from many other nations. A multidisciplinary approach has been taken to include an insight in to the agronomy, plant breeding, biotechnology, biochemistry and process engineering for the different industrial uses.

The book succeeds in its aim of providing information on industrial crops suitable for a textbook for graduate-level students and to present current research and developments of interest to researchers and professionals involved in the industrial utilization of plants. The reader might have benefited slightly by the split into different parts being shown more distinctly – in the text it is only the chapters rather than the parts of the book that are defined. With different chapters written by different authors, it is inevitable that there is some repetition in terms of background, but this does not detract from this extremely useful book as a whole.