Editorial: Waste to wealth: A sustainable circular bioeconomy approach

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Waste to wealth: A sustainable circular bioeconomy approachAs a consequence of industrialization, global urbanization, and economic development, solid waste generation is increasing rapidly, which requires immediate and effective solutions. Several scientific efforts in response to this challenge resulted in the production of valuable industrial products from waste materials, which is a key factor for the emerging circular bioeconomy concept (Leong et al., 2021). Environmental friendly utilization of lignocellulosic biomass and/or waste materials for the production of value-added products often involves the use of biotechnology. The microbial enzymes convert the lignocellulosics into C6 and C5 sugars via enzymatic hydrolysis. Further, these sugars can be converted into targeted bio-products by specific microorganisms. Utilization of lignocellulosics for these value-added products will not only reduce the dependency on fossil fuels but will also help in environment friendly production of value-added products e.g., chemicals (like organic acids, furans, polyols, oligosaccharides, polyhydroxyalkanoates, etc.), or other bio-products (like phenolic compounds, pigments, fertilizers, etc.) (Grewal et al., 2022;Singh et al., 2022).This Research Topic on Waste to wealth: A sustainable circular bioeconomy approach provided a platform for novel research that aims to suggest new multidisciplinary theoretical and experimental designs for the process of utilizing agro-industrial waste materials for biorefineries by extracting not just bioenergy and/or biofuels but also other valuable platform chemicals, oligomers, and polymers.The research focus of all the accepted papers was mainly the use of wild-type as well as genetically engineered microbes for the production of industrially important chemicals by utilizing agro-industrial wastes. The first research paper was mainly focused on the production and characterization of cellulases from Bacillus subtilis CD001 which was acidothermophilic in nature and might find widespread industrial applications in biomass

Recent progress in microbial fuel cells using substrates from diverse sources

“…This process results in the release of greenhouse gases and volatile substances into the atmosphere, and the sludge generated also creates disposal issues [ 5 ]. As untreated waste water has many sources and tracks with local economic factors [ 6 ], treatment of wastewater should be transformed from a cost to a benefit, as is being considered with other “waste-to-wealth” initiatives [ 7 ], in which biotechnology is factoring in heavily [ 8 ]. Indeed, wastewater has a high energy content and can be used as an energy source [ 1 , 5 ].…”