• Energy Research

The development of sustainable and low carbon impact processes for a suitable management of waste and by-products coming from different factors of the industrial value chain like agricultural, forestry and food processing industries. Implementing this will helps to avoid the negative environmental impact and global warming. The application of the circular bioeconomy (CB) and the circular economic models have been shown to be a great opportunity for facing the waste and by-products issues by bringing sustainable processing systems which allow to the value chains be more responsible and resilient. In addition, biorefinery approach coupled to CB context could offer different solution and insights to conquer the current challenges related to decrease the fossil fuel dependency as well as increase efficiency of resource recovery and processing cost of the industrial residues. It is worth to remark the important role that the biotechnological processes such as fermentative, digestive and enzymatic conversions play for an effective waste management and carbon neutrality.

With the huge energy demand inevitably exacerbates the non-renewable resources depletion and ecological-social challenges, renewable energy has become a crucial participant in sustainable strategy. Biorefinery emerged as a sustainable approach and recognized promising transformation platforms for products, to achieve circular bioeconomy which focuses on the biomass efficient and sustainable valorization, promotes resource regeneration and restorative. The emerged biowaste biorefinery has proved as sustainable approach for integrated bioproducts and further applied this technology in industrial, commercial, agricultural and energy sectors. Based on carbon neutral sustainable development, this review comprehensive explained the biowaste as renewable resource generation and resource utilization technologies from the perspective of energy, nutrient and material recovery in the concept of biorefinery. Integrate biorefinery concepts into biowaste management is promise for conversion biowaste into value-added materials and contribute as driving force to cope with resource scarcity, climate changes and huge material demand in circular bioeconomy. In practice, the optimal of biorefinery technologies depends on environmentally friendly, economic and technical feasibility, social and policy acceptance. Additionally, policy interventions are necessary to promote biowaste biorefinery implements for circular bioeconomy and contribute to low-carbon cleaner environment.

Proteins have always been vital biological molecules used for industrial purposes, human nutrition and health. Nowadays, seeking new alternatives and sources of these biomolecules is becoming an increasing research trend derived from the present consumer awareness between food consumption and health promotion, but also on environmental sustainability. Although there are different consolidated/traditional downstream processes to obtain proteins, such as chromatography tools, alkali hydrolysis, precipitation by inorganic salts and organic solvents, their industrial-scale application still demands urgent innovation due to the poor recovery yields, high costs and time-consuming steps, environmental impact as well as some toxic concerns. Polyelectrolyte precipitation represents a green, innovative alternative for protein recovery; however, there are reduced data regarding its pilot or industrial-scale application. In this literature work, the action mechanism and principles with regards to its functionality and insights for its application on a big scale are reviewed. Overall, this review discusses the novelty and sustainability of protein precipitation by polyelectrolytes from different sources against traditional techniques as well as highlights the relationship between protein source, production relevance and bioactive properties that are key factors to maximize the application of this extractive method on a circular economy context.

Increases in population and urbanization leads to generation of a large amount of food waste (FW) and its effective waste management is a major concern. But putrescible nature and high moisture content is a major limiting factor for cost effective FW valorization. Bioconversion of FW for the production of value added products is an eco-friendly and economically viable strategy for addressing these issues. Targeting on production of multiple products will solve these issues to greater extent. This article provides an overview of bioconversion of FW to different value added products.