Image: Flickr/shisho_1975
For tens of thousands of years, human societies have struggled to come up with solutions for what to do with all the waste they produce. It is a dilemma that has grown only more exasperating. Since 2008, according to the United Nations, a majority of the world's population now lives in cities, many of which lack even rudimentary energy generation and waste management infrastructures.
New research findings announced today offer a small, albeit promising, breakthrough in addressing the vexing issue of waste. And the work is taking place at the nexus of rapid urbanization, widening consumer participation and ecological crisis -- that is, in China.
The team of researchers, led by Carol Lin of the City University of Hong Kong, describes successful laboratory testing of a biorefinery procedure that converts stale bakery goods from Starbucks coffee shops into a key consumer goods ingredient. It's a breakthrough that, Lin suggests, could generate a high return on investment and process many tons of garbage that would otherwise end up in a landfill or solid waste incinerator.
"In Hong Kong, the issue of food waste is very important. Each person in Hong Kong produces, on average, a half a kilogram of food waste per day. It's the highest, on average, of all Asian countries," said Lin. She added that three of Hong Kong's landfills will reach capacity by 2018, bringing an already problematic situation to a head.
Refining organic materials is nothing new. Commercial-scale efforts have existed for over a hundred years that convert corn, sugar cane and other plant-based substances into a wide array of products, ranging from fuel such as corn-based ethanol to ingredients in many consumer goods, such as soap and detergents. Henry Ford's original Model T of the early 20th century, for example, was designed to run on hemp-based ethanol.
Since that time, biorefinery techniques have grown in complexity and are now producing chemical substitutes for many petroleum-based materials. Public- and private-sector interest in the process is driven by any number of concerns about fossil fuel supplies, greenhouse gas emissions, generating rural development or scientific research efforts, and building sustainable sources of energy.
It is also potentially profitable. The production of bio-based chemicals could generate, in the estimation of International Energy Agency's task force on biorefinery, $10 billion to $15 billion in revenue for the global chemical industry.
Using food wastes rather than food
What is new about the work of Lin and her colleagues is their success in refining food waste, rather than processing grains that might otherwise be used for food. In this way, their procedure, if expanded to commercial scale, could alleviate stress on municipal waste infrastructures at the same time as producing commercially viable materials that do not constrain food supplies.
"We are developing a new kind of biorefinery, a food biorefinery, and this concept could become very important in the future, as the world strives for greater sustainability," Lin said in a press statement about the research.
"Using corn and other food crops for bio-based fuels and other products may not be sustainable in the long-run. Concerns exist that this approach may increase food prices and contribute to food shortages in some areas of the world. Using waste food as the raw material in a biorefinery certainly would be an effective alternative," she added.
The process works like this: The stale baked goods are mixed with fungi, which generate enzymes that break down the carbohydrates in the food into simple sugars. These are then placed into fermentation tanks, where bacteria convert the sugars to succinic acid.
In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy identified succinic acid as the leading material that might be converted from biomass to high-value commercial materials. It topped the agency's list of 12 sugar-derived substances.
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Add CommentLearn from Starbucks. Kill that stupid floating facetwit garbage because it's wasting my screen space, irritating my senses and starting to become a chronic pain in my neck.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. Anyone like that floater?
2. Anyone considering it a major and imbecile nuisance?
It annoys me too especially that it follows every time i read an extra sentence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey have learned from Starbucks. They are recycling what was once an empty margin to provide something that at least some people appear to be using. I have no intention of ever using it but I can't say that I find it particularly annoying or distracting. I certainly can't see why it seems to be causing so much angst for some people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAngst? Why would I be afraid of the stupid thing? What it does is it p**s me off because that stupidity is wasting my screen space for nothing at all except for some nerds' idiotic belief in that overrated facebook thingie which is showing its true value on the stock market. Here I am trying to understand a scientific article and a bar containing a thumb and other icons and colours and signs keeps jumping up and down every time my display moves. If I scroll down it jumps down and then back and if I need to check a previous paragraph it jumps up again and if I need to find something and I scroll a few times up and time it jumps all over the place. It has all kinds of ugly and unpleasant side effects. You underestimate the neurovisual irritation and its quite substantial waste of neural energy that is subtracted from the energy you use to read and understand the article. That thing was fine where it was, under an article, where anyone believing in those links can use them. Other than that it's pure idiocy. And the longer it stays the more insulted I feel. Maybe you are less sensitive to it or you have tunnelvision but it drives me nuts. It starts to heavily affect the way I perceive SciAm. A major step towards supermarket stardom it may be, it's disgusting me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisand it's a cheat too as there is no button which says "dislike" or "scrap this article" or "bin it".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's one-sided, the social equivalent of a one-party, one leader rule: vote for this leader because that's all the choice you get.
and another thing: have you noticed how certain things that a PR manager would consider negatively affecting the image when an editorial or blogging piece of scientific cretinism drew flak have disappeared?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn short, the floater is expected to draw only "thumbs up" and everything that looks like criticism is removed. One rule, one leader, one party, one opinion.
SciAm is being revamped by spin graduates is what that means.
Which tells me that some idiot is attempting to redo the mag for "a larger market".
And we wonder why scientists lose credibility?
JC, internet advertising is here to stay. You get most of your content on the internet for FREE... companies make money selling advertising, they need to make money to function and provide your FREE content. If you want to get rid of ads, take out a subscription to SA!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI did not even notice the ad thingie until you made such an issue of it, and I'm sure most others missed it as well.