Rapid repurposing of pulp and paper mills, biorefineries, and breweries for lignocellulosic sugar production in global food catastrophes

Abstract

Lignocellulosic sugar for food production has a significant role to play in buildingresilience and responding to global disasters and catastrophes, such as concurrentweather events, pandemics or sun-blocking events such as nuclear war, asteroidimpact, and volcanic eruptions that could cause global agricultural failure.This study examines how quickly edible sugar could be scaled globally from the sugarplatform biorefinery and a brewery by a sub-unit component comparison of the NRELBiochemical Sugar Model. We show that 45% of the world’s current sugar demandcould be produced by repurposing the world’s pulp & paper mills after 5 monthsthrough constructing 24/7. This was estimated to reduce the time of construction to32% of the expected time at an increased cost of 1.5 times, meaning sugar productionwould begin after 5 months at a retail cost of $2.40/kg.

Deployment of Resilient Foods Can Greatly Reduce Famine in an Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenario

“…Energy and macronutrient requirements represent the minimum recommended daily intake for an average weight adult (62 kg): Energy -2,100 Kcal/day 13 , Protein -51 g/day and Fat -47 g/day 52 . This is in line with previous assessments of GCFS 9,[15][16][17][18] . Quality of protein (i.e., the full complement of amino acids in sufficient proportions), and quality of fat (i.e., sufficient unsaturated fat, and omega-3 and omega6 fatty acids) are beyond the scope of this paper, although baskets of the same resilient foods as discussed in this paper have been calculated to provide a protein-complete diet 9 .…”

“…Previously estimated growth rate models are used for estimating the growth rate of industrial foods 18,15 . We account for the management of food reserves and livestock carried in from before the onset of a 150 Tg scenario, as well as redirection of crops away from biofuel production and animal feed.…”

“…Relocation contributed to meeting macronutritional needs most when scaled in combination with other foods. While many challenges remain before they are ready for rapid deployment at scale, solutions such as industrial foods and seaweeds could possibly scale to 2x or more of current global human minimum caloric requirements within the first few years after a 150 Tg scenario onset, given sufficiently large portions of global industrial and economic resources [15][16][17][18][19] .…”

Surfactants produced from carbohydrate derivatives: A review of the biobased building blocks used in their synthesis

“…Nevertheless, climate change, sustainability awareness, and the development of the circular bio‐economy concept (Garcia‐Peréz et al, 2021; Hassan et al, 2019; Markande et al, 2021; Tan & Lamers, 2021; Zambrano, Marquez, et al, 2021a) has made this inviable, according to stakeholders. Therefore, possible scenarios of food shortages due to climate change (Mika et al, 2018; Throup et al, 2021) have raised the interest in nonconventional sources of edible carbohydrates (Asim et al, 2021; Pereira et al, 2021; Throup et al, 2021). As a result, the current trend is to use crop‐derived starch to produce biocompatible and food‐grade surfactants (Bhadani et al, 2020).…”

Global distribution of forest classes and leaf biomass for use as alternative foods to minimize malnutrition

“…For both scenarios, the percentage of dry weight of leaves that can be extracted as edible food for different tree species would also need to be experimentally determined. These techniques would need to be weighed against other solutions previously discussed in a partial sun-obscuring disaster as well as new solutions such as scaling up greenhouse crop production (Alvarado et al, 2020), microbial protein production from hydrogen conversion (Martínez et al, 2021), or biorefinery repurposing for sugar production (Throup et al, 2020). Finally, it may be possible that a lower caloric intake than the World Health Organization (WHO, 2012) recommendations is possible, so more clarity is required in the caloric input necessary to sustain human life to calculate the mass of leaf biomass that needs to be available in all scenarios.…”