Marine Microbes as Cell Factories to Produce Biopolymers from Food Waste: A Model of Circular Resource Utilization

Abstract

The human population has reached 8 billion, which is more than carrying capacity of biosphere. The increasing population produces mammoth amount of waste specifically nutrient rich biodegradable food waste and nondegradable synthetic polymers waste. Plastics and polymers are an inevitable part of our day-to-day existence. However, as they are derived from fossil fuel they are nondegradable, unsustainable and pollute the environment. In contrast biopolymers, which are obtained from plants and microorganisms, can be viable preferences to synthetic polymers. Biopolymers produced by marine bacteria not only are attractive substitutes to unsustainable and nondegradable synthetic polymers but can also be produced through environment friendly microbial bio-factories as part of integrated bioprocesses. These biopolymers produced by marine bacteria are novel with wide and varied applications. However, principle difficulty in bacterial biopolymer production is high cost of production media which mainly due to high carbon requirement of microorganisms for efficient biopolymer production. With increasing population, enormous amount of food and dairy waste are generated globally. These food and dairy wastes have high content of organic matters such as carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids. The disposal of these nutrient rich food and dairy waste is costly and if not disposed appropriately, causes pollution. However, the high carbon content of food and dairy waste make them ideal and cheap alternatives of carbon substrate for exopolysaccharides and polyhydroxyalkanoates production by microorganisms. The utilization of food waste for formulating the production medium for biopolymer production by microorganisms would substantially reduce the production cost of microbial polymers; additionally, it would deal with the complex issue of managing food waste by effectively recycling the food industry waste for production of valuable microbial biopolymers. The use of food and dairy waste for biopolymer production would thus be an excellent model of circular resource utilization.