Turning food waste to energy and resources towards a great environmental and economic sustainability: An innovative integrated biological approach

Abstract

Food waste (FW) management is a global conundrum because of the rapid population growth and growing economic activity. Currently, incineration and landfill are still the main means for FW management, while their environmental sustainability and economic viability have been in question. Recently, the biological processes including anaerobic digestion, aerobic composting, bioethanol fermentation, feed fermentation etc. have attracted increasing interest with the aims for energy and resource recovery from FW. However, these biological approaches have inherent drawbacks, and cannot provide a comprehensive solution for future FW management. Therefore, this review attempts to offer a critical and holistic analysis of current biotechnologies for FW management with the focus on the challenges and solutions forward. The biological approaches towards future FW management should be able to achieve both environmental sustainability and economic viability. In this instance, the concept of zero solid discharge-driven resource recovery has thus been put forward. According to which, several innovative biological processes for FW management are further elucidated with critical analysis on their engineering feasibility and environmental sustainability. It turns out that is an urgent need for turning current single task-orientated bioprocess to an integrated biological process with multiple tasks of concurrent recovery of water, resource and energy together with zero-solid discharge.

Keywords: Anaerobic digestion; Bioenergy; Biofertilizer; Environmental and economic sustainability; Enzymatic hydrolysis; Food waste; Integrated biological processes; Zero-solid discharge.