From Menace to Treasure: Engineering Sustainability through Biotechnology Mediated Valorization of Waste

One of the biggest challenges being faced by the industrial sector today is not only limited to dealing with rising costs of manufacturing by investing effort in minimizing non-renewable inputs, but also maximizing production to meet with a rising global demand fuelled by population growth and standards of living. Also in this era of a growing global consciousness towards sustainability and increasingly stringent environmental regulations, they have to be very cautious about waste management options. A big conundrum indeed!

The general idea of consolidation and integration in processing and manufacturing is a definitive step towards achieving a solution to this problem. Aiding this endeavour are environmental biotechnology and bioprocessing, which present biological engineering avenues to generate products in a sustainable manner—and also give opportunities to remediate the environment. In fact, bioremediation has often become the key to identify reusable or novel products from waste streams which help industries reduce capital and material inputs to the process, generate revenue and overcome waste disposal costs and issues. These processes are being widely recognized as a part of the development of smart, circular bio-economies consisting of brownfield operations aimed at value-addition to the environmental decontamination processes and seamless integration of very different sectors of the global economy.

Anupama’s talk will focus on these broader aspects within the context of her thesis work. Her research is focused on examining a specific industrial waste—pulp and paper mill sludge—as a feedstock for development of a circular bioprocess around this industry. The pulp and paper industry, while an important economic mainstay of the Canadian and BC economy, is also one of the most polluting industries and has a very high water and land footprint. The latter mostly stems from land based sludge disposal. The lignocellulosic nature of this waste presents exciting opportunities for developing bioconversion platforms and making the broader vision of zero-discharge paper mills possible.